


There's Going to be Some Changes

by hermitreunited



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, I've been calling this my 1963 fic, M/M, Time Travel Shenanigans, a true ensemble family piece, alright now that we have an actual s2 I can say that there are similarities! but also, and full disclosure it's got some Klaus whump because I can't help it, and okay it IS an ensemble they all have things to do, because I didn't know any of that when I started coming up with it, but tbf the Dave and Klaus stuff is pretty heavily weighted, genuinely this has everyone, it goes in quite a different direction, multiple POVs so you will get to hear from everyone at some point, sort of a speculative s2 except the synopsis for that is already pretty different, they all land together and there are no new s2 characters etc
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-17
Updated: 2020-09-16
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:20:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 32,851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24762994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hermitreunited/pseuds/hermitreunited
Summary: The first thing that Five does, as the white-blue light fades from Allison’s vision, is to growl, “Don’t fuck everything up.” The second thing he does is pass out.They’ve got figure out where they are, andwhenthey are. Figure out how to stop the end of the world. It took Five, who’s basically a genius, if a bratty one, over forty years, and that wasn’t long enough. Now the rest of them are on the clock, and Five is unconscious.It’s time for ‘The Hargreeves Try to Save The World,’ take three.aka, an alternate s2 story that picks up right where s1 ends, plotted out when all I knew was that they'd be in 1963.
Relationships: Dave/Klaus Hargreeves
Comments: 246
Kudos: 225





	1. Chapter One

“I’ve heard you make a mean whiskey sour.” 

Dave hasn’t been working at this bar for very long, so he’s not sure how anyone could have ‘heard about’ his mixed drinks.  He’s also pretty sure he’s not very good at it, actually.  But alright, he can make a passable whiskey sour.

He wishes it was more than passable when he turns to slide the drink across the bar and makes eye contact with the guy. Big green eyes, long dark lashes. Looking at Dave like he really does think this drink will change his life. Dave doesn’t want to disappoint him with this subpar drink, but it's only his third month on the job. He hasn't been around long enough.

“What can I get for you?” Dave asks the Hispanic guy with him.

“Alcohol.” 

"Have I got great news for you, then. This is a bar!”

It's the kind of bartender joke that usually provides a little guidance, but the guy just nods heavily and says, “Yeah.” So Dave makes him a whiskey sour, too. And another one, after he downs the first.

It’s not a bartender’s place to judge. Even if he were, these two guys look like they really have been through it. Hair thick with dried sweat, stiff muscles, tired eyes staring at nothing but still seeing too much.

Not the green-eyed one - he’s staring at Dave, following every move like he’s enraptured. He’s wearing a battered army vest and dog tags - a vet. “You want to slow down on those, Diego?” he asks his friend.

“Not really,” Diego says, slamming his empty glass down as punctuation. “How about another one? It’s been a long day.”

The other man hums, then looks at Dave. “When is it, actually?”

“The time?” Dave points at the clock on the back wall. It’s late, they’ll be closing up in under an hour. 

“Right, wow, long day.” The guy says. He’s nodding, but it doesn’t seem like he’s satisfied with the answer. “And the day is…”

“Tuesday.” Technically. Given the hour.

“April?”

“November 17.”

“Nineteen sixty - ”

“Three.”

“Right. November 17, 1963. Long day.” He flashes a big smile. He’s been half-smiling this whole time, but this one takes up his whole face. It’s so bright. Dave can’t help but smile back, even though this entire exchange is so deeply odd.

“You haven’t worked here long,” he says, drawing the words out like he’s piecing something together.

At least Dave knew this was coming. “Sorry that whiskey sour isn't living up to your expectations."

It doesn’t look like the guy has touched the thing. Still, he says, “Oh no, it’s great,” and takes a sip. He can’t help wincing, though, before he pulls up another grin. Dave might call it fake, coming on so quick, but there’s fondness there that he can’t explain. 

“It’s not even that strong, calm down,” he hisses off to the side. 

“I’m still learning, I guess.” Dave pulls out a towel and wipes down the glossy wood of the counter - one part of being a bartender that he knows he can handle. “You’re right, I’ve only been here three months.”

The words come easily, but what’s not spoken pools up too quickly, too. His dad worked here. Dave has spent three months - well, three months and 22 days, which is, shit, almost four months now - filling in for him. Almost four months since he died. 

The man raises his eyebrows and tells him, “You can’t be good at everything, Dave.” Then he takes another sip of his drink, and almost chokes. Surely it’s not actually _that_ bad? No one else has ever had such a strong reaction.

“Look, let me get you something else,” he offers. “On the house.”

“No, no, it’s fine.” He waves Dave off, too quickly for Dave to make out what is scribbled on his palms. 

“I’ll take his.”

The guy hisses at Diego and yanks his glass protectively closer. “Quit it, you don’t need more.”

“You're preaching moderation at me, Klaus? _You?”_ Diego shakes his head and gestures at Dave to keep them coming.

“Sorry,” Klaus says as Dave pours out some shots. No point in messing around with anything else when he's putting them away so fast. “He’s just a terrible person.”

“As long as he tips well, I don’t mind.”

“Oh, he will.” Klaus leans in and stage whispers, “I stole his wallet.”

“You what?”

Klaus pushes a shot into his hands. “Diego, dear, drink your liquor and be quiet.”

It flows off his tongue so easily. Calling this other man ‘dear.’ It makes Dave notice how the collar of the shirt underneath Klaus’ vest swoops so low, so revealing. His loose posture, the thick dark lines bringing out his eyes. The spark shining in those eyes when they slip slowly from the whiskey swirling in his glass up to meet Dave’s gaze.

Dave flushes. Suddenly his palms are sweaty and his mouth is dry. He grabs a towel to wipe down the already clean counter, needing it more as a prop than anything else.

Klaus takes another sip. He takes an expectant inhale, but hesitates, just blows the air out in a sigh. The Penguins are doing a poor job of filling up the otherwise empty bar. 

A good bartender is a good listener, can team up with the alcohol to get a heavy story out of a burdened man and send him on his way lighter than before. But Dave hasn’t even been here for four whole months. He’s not that good.

Klaus picks up the slack. “Nice fellow like you, probably you’ve got a girlfriend.”

Dave nods. “Annie.”

Klaus nods too, like he was expecting this. “But you’re planning to propose to her soon.”

Yes. Dave doesn’t know how something like that can be obvious to an outside observer. There’s no rings, no actual proposals have happened yet. But it’s true, what Klaus is saying.

“That’s what you do when the girl you took to prom stays with your sorry ass for this long, right?” he says. 

Klaus looks thoughtful. “You’ve really got to be sure that it’s the right thing to do, when you do that.” His gaze cuts to Dave, much more piercing and clear-eyed than he’s used to seeing in this place.

No one could accuse Dave of not devoting enough thought to popping this particular question. Most of his classmates didn’t wait near this long to get married, actually. A couple of the guys from the marching band are fathers already. 

Annie is nice. She’s lovely. She’s got a beautiful singing voice, and she's funny, and she’s kind to everyone. Kind enough to go to prom with Dave, and to stay waiting for him for this long. There’s being a gentleman, and then there’s whatever Dave is doing.

What he’s doing is nothing. He’s pretty sure he doesn’t deserve the credit he gets for being ‘such a respectful young man,’ since it’s not like he is responsibly overcoming his baser desires. He just hasn’t felt like that about Annie. Not yet. So he hasn’t proposed yet, either.

He knows he’s supposed to - he’s _known_ that, for a while, but it’s been weighing on his mind even more lately. Since his dad’s accident. Life is short, and his mom could really use some good news now, and Annie is nice, and somewhere buried in all of that must be the reason why it’s the right thing to do.

He really is the worst bartender. This conversation is all turned around. He tries to get things back on track. Be conventional. “Do you have a girlfriend, then?” His voice comes out sounding odd, for some reason Dave can’t place.

He’d be shocked if this guy was single. Not with a smile like that.

“No, I’m - ” Klaus’ voice is strangled and strange, too. “I was close with someone. But he - we couldn’t make it work.” He’s looking at Dave like he’s wishing for an answer, but it’s not even a question. Then he blinks the suspended moment away, and grumbles off to his side, “I get that.”

Dave didn’t miss the pronoun. He shouldn’t focus on it, Klaus was quick to correct it. But he can’t stop hearing it. There’s only the three of them in whole bar, but something about the close weight of the air makes it seem like they are enclosed in the same small space.

“She made me want to be a better person,” Diego says into his empty glass, “because she was such a good person. Now I’ll never see her again.”

Klaus smiles wryly. “You never know, it’s 1963. Depends how long you stay alive.” His curling hair soaks up the neon lights from the window. Green, purple, red, blue. Every part of him is so vibrant.

“Shit, the sixites.” Diego groans and puts his forehead down on the bar top. “That’s why the music is so bad.”

It’s Sam Cooke. It’s not bad music even a little bit. And this song! ‘I know I love you and you alone were meant for me.’ The idea that he could feel like that one day makes Dave’s heart feel like it’s in free fall.

“Hey, be nice,” Klaus says. “Dave likes this song.”

Goosebumps sweep up his arms, below his rolled up sleeves. Thinking back, he can’t remember mentioning his name. “Where are you guys from?”

With an edge of damp hysteria, Diego starts laughing. His shoulders shake enough that Klaus has to lean over and grab him so he doesn’t keel out of his stool. 

“You are going to have the worst hangover of your life,” he tells Diego, although it doesn’t seem like he’s paying any attention to Klaus’ words. “I think that’s probably been enough desecration of your temple for tonight, bro.” He turns his head, like he’s listening to someone talking over his shoulder, and then says, “Yeah, we should get back.”

There’s no one else in the bar. There’s nobody there. 

Suddenly, Dave is very aware that it’s the wee hours of the morning and he’s alone in here with these strangers. One of them is wearing some kind of secret agent commando outfit, like not only does he know how to kill someone, but he’s done it before. And the other one is somehow even more frightening. The way Klaus looks at Dave, like he knows him better than Dave even knows himself. They’ve never met before. He’s looking at him like that right now. It makes Dave shiver.

“I’ve got to leave,” Klaus says, voice dreamy and distant, talking to himself in a way that’s different, somehow, than when he’d talked to himself a moment ago. He won’t stop _staring_ at Dave. Dave’s not sure of what he’s seeing.

Klaus nods, and nods. Psyching himself up for something. He tosses back what’s left of his drink, snags a shot Diego hadn’t gotten to yet and does the same. “You - you should - ”

Dave doesn’t find out what he should do. Klaus stammers the start of a few sentences, never far enough that Dave has any idea what he’s trying to say. Dave’s heart pounds under the force of this nervous intensity. He doesn’t know _why,_ not about any of it.

Diego pushes himself to his feet and announces, “Klaus. I’m going to throw up.”

“Probably not a bad idea, but not in here. Let’s not do that to Dave.” He prods his slow-moving friend forward, aiming him at the door. “Don’t want that to be what he remembers us by.”

Like that could outshine any of the rest of this night. As if that could be more memorable than the inexplicable way that Klaus’ gaze makes Dave both chilled and flushed.

Klaus throws a wad of bills on the counter and smiles, blinding and sincere and complicated. His green eyes are bright. “Thank you,” he says.

Dave’s mixed drinks are not good enough to warrant that kind of gratitude. “I’ll work on making a better whiskey sour, for when you come back.” He doesn’t know why he says it. His rational brain says it’d be for the best to never see this man again. But he says it anyway.

“It’ll be perfect,” Klaus says. 

Then he ducks out the door to catch up with his friend. He left the biggest tip Dave’s ever gotten in his life. And it wasn't even a good drink.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is going to be a _muuuuch_ longer story! I just got thinking about Klaus meeting a baby Dave in 1963 who doesn't know anything about their relationship at all, and things ended up going off the rails, with _plot_ and _time travel_ and feelings about all of the sibs having to keep going, with no break, even after the week they'd just been through.
> 
> I've got 5 chapters written so far, but there is a lot more to come after that. Normally, I wouldn't start posting when I don't have it completely written, but the promo pics and everything has just got me excited. I'm sure I'm not the only one... I can't say that there will be regular updates, but I do think I'll put the second chapter up in a few days, since that one sort of lays out the plot of this thing more.
> 
> Sneak peak from chapter two:  
> “I think it’s good advice,” Luther says.  
> “Sure,” Klaus says agreeably, “but since when has that mattered? The only thing we do is fuck everything up.”  
> Diego huffs a bleak laugh. “We ended the world.”  
> “Not yet,” Luther says, but he doesn’t sound convinced.


	2. Chapter Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “We don’t have time for this,” Five snaps.  
> “That’s rich, coming from you.” Diego is never as intimidating as he thinks he is, but the hiccups really undercut this moment for him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Quick note to say that technically the scene from chapter one happens between the two scenes in this chapter. Just wanted to be clear about that since there is already enough going on with time in this story; I didn't want this to get too confusing!

_Earlier_

The first thing that Five does, as the white-blue light fades from Allison’s vision, is to growl, “Don’t fuck everything up.” The second thing he does is pass out.

That’s two of her siblings, lying unconscious on the tan carpet. It makes her chest hurt to see, or maybe that’s from the time travel. At least it’s a better view than the world going up in flames.

“Who does he think he’s talking to?” Klaus’ garbled voice comes from somewhere on her left. Her stomach lurches when she turns her head too fast. He doesn’t look like he’s feeling too great, either. He staggers to his feet but immediately sinks down into a folding chair. There’s a few rows of them, about 20 chairs all told, and given the shabby upright piano in the corner, Allison guesses they are in some kind of music practice room. Judging by the color scheme, not a very current one. At least, not current where she’s from.

“I think it’s good advice,” Luther says. He’s sitting with his back pressed against the wall, his eyes pressed closed. Diego hasn’t bothered with getting vertical at all. Allison realizes that she’s standing, and she really doesn’t need to be. Luckily there is a chair right beside her.

“Sure,” Klaus says agreeably, “but since when has that mattered? The only thing we _do_ is fuck everything up.”

Diego huffs a bleak laugh. “We ended the world.”

“Not yet,” Luther says, but he doesn’t sound convinced. He’s staring at Five and Vanya, at their bodies sprawled heavy and unmoving on the floor.

“Sisyphus and his stupid fucking rock,” Klaus mutters.

Allison doesn’t care how many tries it takes, she will reach the top of that hill when it’s Claire’s life that’s up there. All of her siblings’ lives. All of the world.

“We’re here; that means we have a chance. We’ll fix it,” she says. 

It takes a moment for that to sink in. Allison _said_ something. Her hand flies to her neck, where there’s no bandage, no pain. She wants to test it out, make sure this isn’t a hallucination or a fluke, but she is shocked speechless. She can’t think of a single thing to say.

Luther’s eyebrows shoot up. “Allison, you’re - how?”

She shakes her head. “I don’t know!”

A sleeping Five offers no answers.

“Something about going through time,” Luther muses.

“What else can that little twerp do?” Diego asks, but again, nobody has any answers. Allison’s mind is racing, but it keeps tripping over the part where her voice is _completely healed,_ and she can’t get much farther than that.

Klaus says, “Sorry buddy, it doesn’t seem like it.”

She can’t even feel a scar. A better rehearsal space would have a mirrored wall, and she could _see._ A better person wouldn’t care so much, probably. A hard habit to kick, with the number of times her appearance has literally made headlines, but a better person wouldn’t let excuses hold her back, either. 

Quietly, Luther peeks under his coat sleeves, and his face falls. Their jump through time didn’t fix everything. He still fills out that massive overcoat just fine. Her heart aches for him. There hasn’t been time, yet, to talk about it - about what their father did to him. There’s still not time. Time travel doesn’t actually make anything slow down.

They’ve got figure out where they are, and _when_ they are. Figure out how to stop the end of the world. It took Five, who’s basically a genius, if a bratty one, over forty years, and that wasn’t long enough. Now the rest of them are on the clock, and Five is unconscious.

Everyone soon is.

Everyone but Allison, that is. Her brothers have got to recover from whatever Vanya did to them; the burning white energy she’d hit them with had been destructive enough to blow up the moon. They just need a little sleep to get their strength back. That’s what’s happening. Allison has to believe that’s what’s happening, because she absolutely cannot be stuck in a room in the year 19-who-knows-when with the corpses of her siblings.

She can’t think about their pained expressions, their desiccating faces, as they hung in the air, pinned like bugs frying under a magnifying glass. A magnifying glass that was their sister.

So instead of thinking about that, she explores the room a little, trying to find clues to their location without straying too far. The best intel she gets is from the wall of shelves holding hymnals, none of which have a copyright date past 1959. Which doesn’t bode well.

There’s not much to look through, so then she’s done and staring at her sibling’s bodies again. Not _all_ of her siblings, she realizes.

“Ben.” She doesn’t mean to say it out loud, it’s almost more of a breath than a word. But, “You can hear me.” If he’s here. “Can’t you? I know Klaus is - ” Klaus is a decidedly inactive pile of too-skinny limbs. His neck is going to be so sore when he wakes up from that position. Although he’s probably slept in worse places. “But you’re still here? You’ve been here.”

She pauses, like a person does in a conversation. But that’s pointless. “Oh, I was expecting to hear you. Guess that’s not how it works, not for me, anyway.” 

Allison remembers her early days in Hollywood, how lonely she had been. Purposefully disconnected from her superpowered family, undeniably different than her starlet peers. She’d managed to build a life that distracted from that, until it didn’t anymore. But at least she’d always been able to talk to people, to be heard. Luther on the moon hadn’t been so lucky; neither had Ben, attached to the earth but not a part of it. They’ve all known too much isolation.

“I’m glad you at least had Klaus with you, for all this time since—” She can’t say that. Not to his face, even if she can’t see it. God, no wonder Klaus was such a mess at the funeral. 

“And I’m glad Klaus had you. I’m sorry that we never realized.” Her eyes prick with tears. It’s a weird time to mourn one person, after the whole world has gone up in smoke, and when she just found out that this person is more still alive than she ever knew. Or maybe this all makes it the perfect time. She’s tired too, she was pulled through time too, so a little bit of hysteria might be warranted. It’s hard to be okay with letting loose when she’s not actually alone in this moment, though. 

All the things Ben must have seen. Some apparently not-so-secret moments of her life, her siblings’ lives. Klaus’ life. The way none of them believed Klaus about Ben. How that must have hurt both of them. Allison just wants to stop hurting people. 

But actions have consequences, ripples that she can’t ever completely predict.

“I’m sorry, Ben. So sorry.” There’s a lot to apologize for. More than can be forgiven. She’s sort of glad she can’t hear him - she doesn’t need to know how he responds. In that respect, things with him are the same as they’ve been since that day. Schrödinger’s forgiveness is helpfully whatever she can accept.

* * *

Five spent so long driven only by the desire to return to his family. He’s devoted years of thought to them, longer than they’ve even been alive. It’s inconceivable, then, how he managed to forget how cosmically stupid they all are. Not a lick of sense between them.

When he wakes up, aching with tiredness and his brain running sluggish and thick, Klaus helps Diego to stumble in, drunk out of his mind. As far as Klaus and Diego are concerned, ‘not fucking everything up’ apparently means galavanting around the past to get wasted. They couldn’t just _wait._ Who knows what they changed?

He knows who knows. That’s what he’s scared of.

“Imbeciles,” he growls. Truthfully, it comes out more of a croak as he struggles to push himself up on his elbows.

“Happy to see you alive too, Five,” Diego slurs. “Everyone’s alive and well in nineteen-sixty-fucking-three.”

“Well, we don’t know for sure about that second part.” Klaus tries to steady Diego but he’s trembling, too. He lets Diego slide down the wall and collapse on the ground, with all the grace that the self-proclaimed vigilante is known for.

“1963,” Allison echoes.

Klaus nods. “Civil rights, space race, red scare. It’s a happening time out there.”

“So you thought you’d go get drunk?” It’s not often that Five agrees with Luther, but even a stopped clock, and all that.

Klaus’ look of amusement covers something sharper. “Kettle black, brother.” 

“We don’t have time for this,” Five snaps.

“That’s rich, coming from you.” Diego is never as intimidating as he thinks he is, but the hiccups really undercut this moment for him.

“As the only one in this room who knows dick about time travel, yes, it is coming from me.” 

He glares at each of his siblings in turn. Klaus and Diego are seated on the floor beneath the chalkboard and wearing petulant expressions. Allison and Luther have got matching worried eyebrows, which hopefully mean they’ll actually listen to him. Vanya’s still asleep on the floor. Someone found a cardigan and bundled it under her head, like a pillow. Technically, she’s what ended the world, but apparently it’s not just Five who is having trouble accepting that she’s supposedly dangerous. It never needed to get this far, if only Five hadn’t screwed everything up so badly. Thankfully, second chances aren’t only reserved for those who deserve them.

“Here’s the plan.” He hadn’t wanted to admit that he would need a plan B, but after Meritech exploded, his brain had started running strategies in the background. “A few days from now, I’ll be in Dallas, about to leap through time to get to you all in 2019, 8 days ago.” 

Diego starts to make a noise of confusion, and Five puts up a warning finger. “Sober questions only.” Allison and Luther both stay quiet, so he assumes he hasn’t yet lost the audience that matters. “I’ve got to take out _that_ me, so that _this_ me can take my place, with the knowledge of what went wrong this first time so I can make sure we avoid the apocalypse happening again.”

Nobody is following him anymore. Nobody is willing to admit it first. That’s the only explanation for a moment of quiet in a room full of his siblings.

Klaus is the first one to take a stab at it. “‘Take out’ meaning…” He lets it trail off but when Five doesn’t jump in with a definition, Klaus has to finish it himself. “To kill yourself?”

“A version of myself. I’ll be the me for the new timeline.” There’s chalk by the blackboard; he could sketch it out for them. Although there’s no guarantee that’ll improve anything.

“The new timeline,” Luther repeats. “But you’ll be dead?”

“The whole old timeline will be dead. And considering that’s the one where the moon obliterates the planet, I’m okay with that.”

More blank looks. He’s going to have to crack out some drawings after all. He scribbles a large stick figure on the board. “So this is me, when I was working for the Commission. Back when I looked my age.” Ah, the good old days. That are now almost a week in the future.

He draws an arrow below, pointing at 2019 and adds little stick figure beside the date. “I traveled from 1963 to get to you guys in 2019.”

“And that’s when you turned into Little Five, how sweet!” Klaus crows, scooting across the floor so he can see the board easier. “You even drew yourself miniature. This visual aid is really working for me now.”

“That’s not - ” Not intentional, obviously. He’s also not fond of the way that Klaus made ‘Little Five’ sound like a title. But it actually will come in handy to have a way to distinguish between the two of them. Damnit. “Fine. Yes.”

He draws a long arrow traveling diagonally up from 2019, placing a Little Five at the same height as the Big Five, but on the right side of the board. “Now I’ve traveled back to 1963, and,” he draws a second Big Five beside the 1963 Little Five, “there’s two of us here now. Big Five is in 1963, about to jump to 2019 and become Little Five, and meet all of you, and everything that we already did, in the future.” He gestures at the original drawing on the left.

Crickets. Which could be worse. 

“If we get rid of Big Five - ” he puts an X over the stick figure - “then _I_ can go to 2019. The actual, current me.” He draws an arrow under that Little Five, heading straight down to another 2019. “I’ll take my place, and I can avoid the mistakes we made last time. I’ll get it right this time.”

It’s quiet, for a moment. Next time Five needs everyone to shut up, he knows what to do. Like babies enthralled by colorful lights, his 30-year-old siblings can apparently be distracted by complicated concepts being explained by overly simplistic drawings.

Then Klaus puts up a tentative hand, HELLO quavering in the air. 

Allison talks without waiting for an okay. Haltingly, while still trying to figure it out. “But if you go and change things, then won’t that change you coming here in the first place?”

“A paradox,” Luther says. “You’re making things happen differently.”

Five shakes his head. “It’s not connected like that.” He draws a vertical line, separating the board into two distinct sides. “It’s not ‘the same timeline, but different.’ The first timeline will cease to exist.” He puts a large X across the entire left side, and points at the right side - an X-ed out Big Five, a Little Five jumping to 2019. “This will be a new timeline, similar to the old one, but with whatever the changes make different.”

He decides not to mention that there’s no way that this was the ‘first’ timeline, anyway, given how much altering the Commission does. No need to strain their struggling brains too much.

“Where are we in this scenario?” Klaus asks. “If there’s this us here, and you’re going to the future to see a past us?”

Five decides he'd rather not answer that either, and luckily Allison speaks up with a question of her own. “So you don’t just jump through time, you jump through _timelines?_ Like different dimensions?”

“Is there a timeline where everything isn’t shit? Maybe we should just go there,” Diego says. Klaus points a finger at him, like he’s making a cogent point.

“I don’t jump between the timelines. When one is gone, it’s gone.” Five draws a box around the two Fives in 1963. “Once I get here, I’ve opened up a new timeline, and as long as I’m here making changes, this new reality is in flux, existing alongside the previous one.” 

He taps the stick of chalk on a corner of the square. “This is the inflection point. Once I leave, the new timeline is set, and the changes will catch up to the future. It’s the new reality; the old one is gone. I can’t travel back.”

His siblings are nodding vaguely, which might be the best he can get.

This is the stuff that makes fixing things such a pain, even harder to get right than the time travel itself, which is no picnic. There’s a yawning hole inside his chest, like all his organs were liquified and his empty body is trying to grow them back with no fuel. He’s more than aware that time travel isn’t _easy._ He hadn’t known, not until his very brief stint at Headquarters, exactly how finicky it all is, too.

If Five sends an agent to 1937 to make a change, and at the same time there’s another agent in 1988, their work could combine to make a very new, very unexpected timeline, depending when they jump out. It’s why the Commission was always so busy, constantly putting out their own fires and accidentally lighting new ones. It’s a sprawling organization, too large to actually be organized. 

Five prefers a more surgical approach. To pick the precise moment to introduce a change, while keeping the rest of the variables as unchanged as possible. He’s hoping that between that strategy and the bloat of the Commission, his family will be able to stay under their radar for long enough.

He hates that this plan is so reliant on hoping. And on his siblings remaining inconspicuous. He’s got just under four days to make it to Dallas. Four days for his luck to hold, four days of the Umbrella Academy staying on their best behavior.

It’s time to start thinking of back-up plans for this back-up plan.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Time travel bullshit is hard! To think about and to write about and yes I needed an actual stick figure drawing to make sure it was making sense, so Five needed one, too. I made a Very Good version and posted it on my tumblr so if you would also like a visual aid, [check it out](https://hermitreunited.tumblr.com/post/621555276573802496/it-is-a-very-good-drawing-and-a-visual-aid-for)!
> 
> Also, as good a time as any to say that if you want to come chat on tumblr, please do! I am friendly and love to talk about these kids. I'm [@hermitreunited](https://hermitreunited.tumblr.com/). Thank you everyone who commented and liked the first chapter; it's very exciting to share when I know people are enjoying it!!
> 
> Sneak Peak of Chapter Three:
> 
> There’s doo-wop on the radio and the heat of the day has mellowed into something warm and sleepy, and no one is paying attention to the two of them sitting here sharing cigarettes, just one magnetic inch of space keeping their thighs from touching. It’s sepia and hazy like an old filmstrip, and frankly, it feels as real as one. Happiness isn’t a high that he’s used to, and he needs to come down before he forgets how to do it without falling apart.  
>  He pokes Dave’s arm a few times, as though he didn’t already have Dave’s full attention. Maybe he’s hoping to annoy him away, just to be on steady ground again. Maybe he’s hoping he won’t.


	3. Chapter Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Alright!” Five bellows. He zaps across the room so he’s standing on a chair, maybe thinking more height will give him more authority. Maybe he’s right, Vanya certainly wouldn’t know. “Would you all calm the fuck down; we’re in a church for christ’s sake.”

_Once in a 1968_

It’s too soon to say, too much to admit when they have only just upgraded from hopeful flirting to… to whatever exactly this is with them. It’s still mostly just flirting - there’s not a lot of opportunities to get the fun kind of dirty in 1960s Vietnam - and it’s still hopeful, but in a thrilling, burning way. Not hoping for the attraction to be confirmed, because that has already most definitely been confirmed, but hoping for a chance to confirm it again, and again, and again and again and again.

Whatever it’s called, this bright new togetherness is not even a month old yet, so it’s entirely too soon for declarations of love. But Sam Cooke is crooning out from Kreb’s radio just inside, singing about how he’s given away his heart to the person he loves, and it’s sappy andbeautiful and nostalgic and _true._ Klaus loves Dave. It’s too soon to say it out loud, but it’s not too soon to know that it’s right.

“I love this song,” Dave says, jerking his head towards the open door, but keeping his eyes trained on Klaus’ face. Klaus can’t let himself wonder if Dave feels the same way, or he won’t be able to breathe. In a light, plain voice, Dave sings along, “I love you and you alone were meant for me.”

Klaus isn’t able to breathe.

It’s just never _meant_ this much, with anyone before. Klaus has never meant this much.

It’s war, it’s hell. The ghosts here are the worst he’s ever seen. All of the guys sitting around, shooting the breeze over no-stakes games of cards, they could all die screaming burning deaths tomorrow, maybe even sooner if the VC are feeling especially ambitious and lucky. 

But there’s doo-wop on the radio and the heat of the day has mellowed into something warm and sleepy, and no one is paying attention to the two of them sitting here sharing cigarettes, just one magnetic inch of space keeping their thighs from touching. It’s sepia and hazy like an old filmstrip, and frankly, it feels as real as one. Happiness isn’t a high that he’s used to, and he needs to come down before he forgets how to do it without falling apart.

He pokes Dave’s arm a few times, as though he didn’t already have Dave’s full attention. Maybe he’s hoping to annoy him away, just to be on steady ground again. Maybe he’s hoping he won’t.

Either way, when Dave asks, “What?” Klaus has to scramble to come up with a response.

“Your singing voice is nice,” he says, which is true. It’s straightforward, just like Dave. It makes Klaus think of parchment or canvas, smooth and clean and carrying with it the thrill of something brand new, about to begin.

Dave laughs, and Klaus likes that sound even better than the singing, but he’s heard it a lot more often. “That’s just because you’ve never heard Annie sing,” Dave says. “Voice like an angel.”

“Who’s Annie?”

“Annie’s my - ” Dave cuts himself off. Looks down as he taps ash from his cigarette. “She was my - ”

“Your girlfriend.” The sun’s set far enough that magic hour is gone. The world looks a little more normal in this light.

“My fiancé,’ Dave corrects.

“Oh,” Klaus says. He fiddles with his cigarette, too. It’s not that he can be upset with Dave for having prior relationships. He’s not that much of a hypocrite. He just doesn’t know how to respond. It’s clearly something in Dave’s past, but also something he still has strong feelings about. He decides to go with that. “Sounds like you had strong feelings for her. I bet she’s great.” 

He does, too - if Dave likes her, she’s got to be a pretty lovely person. Dave’s an excellent judge of character; so far, the only exception who has gained Dave’s good opinion without deserving it is a scrawny haunted junkie from the future.

“She is, she’s really great!” He’s very upbeat about it, the way Klaus’ assurances sound when someone well-meaning asks him if he’s kicked that pesky drug habit yet. His next move is usually to quickly bounce to a new subject, so he’s surprised when Dave keeps talking, his voice relaxing into something more natural. “We started seeing each other our senior year of high school, and she was my girlfriend for _years_. She went off to college and I stayed at home and I didn’t mind about the distance, because I didn’t - just talking with her was always enough for me.”

Dave tosses the butt of his cigarette onto the ground and grinds it into the dirt, maybe a little more focused on it than he needs to be. “And then, I was 23, and my dad died. Car accident. And it made me think I needed to be, I don’t know, more alive, or more of a man or something. I loved her, so I proposed to her.”

This is an entirely different species of daddy issues than what Klaus is familiar with. Dad’s death causes you to reevaluate your life choices instead of looting his precious office for valuables to buy some celebratory roxies while your family stages a half-baked dinner theater whodunit? Can’t relate.

“And because I loved her, I couldn’t agree to set a date when I knew that something about it wasn’t right.” Dave winces. “I think I knew what was wrong, for a long time. I just wasn’t brave enough to be honest with myself.” His hand twitches, like he’s stopping himself from reaching out to hold onto Klaus, because even if no one’s looking at them, there _are_ people around. Dave ducks his head. “Not brave like you.”

He’d thought that Dave was getting to know Klaus really well - not including the more fantastical aspects of his life that make him sound literally insane, but at least that Dave knows the truth of who Klaus is, the person at the center of all the comic book bullshit. Apparently Dave’s still got a lot to learn, if he thinks that ‘brave’ is a word that can describe _Klaus_.

“I could have saved her a lot of time and heartache. Saved me time, too. Not that I’m disappointed, not for me, not when the it all brought me to you.” He grins and nudges Klaus with his shoulder. Friendly ribbing. Soldiers shove each other around all the time. It looks normal, from the outside, since no one else knows the way that the heat lingers on Klaus’ skin.

“I just wish that I hadn’t hurt her. I didn’t mean to. But I know I did anyway.” Dave sighs, and scrubs a hand through his hair. He pulls forward from the back of his head, aggravating a springy cowlick that Klaus would do anything to be able to tangle around his fingers. It’s probably a good thing, for his already pitiful ability to get some shut-eye, that a smack-for-canoodling trade is not on the table.

“Alright, sorry. I’ll quit moping. There’s no point to it anyway. The past is in the past, you can’t change it.”

“Right,” Klaus agrees. “Of course.” 

He wonders if he sounds breathless to Dave’s ears. He wonders if there’s any way to explain that the less hypothetical that ‘you’ is, the less true that truism might be. He wonders if Dave would still deem the guilt and the hurt and the fucking Vietnam War to be worth it for ‘bringing him to Klaus,’ if he knew that there’s a time machine stuffed underneath Klaus’ cot.

He could ask, could play along with the hypothetical. He blows a stream of smoke out into the Vietnamese sunset, and he doesn’t.

* * *

It’s some kind of twisted parody, the way that he holds onto himself when he cries. Like maybe if his grip is tight enough, he’ll forget it’s his own arms and can pretend they’re Dave’s. Klaus isn’t half as strong, though, and his weakness isn’t something he’s ever been able to forget.

He’s empty, at his center. Not nothing, not hollow. Empty like a black hole - a pulling, sucking, empty that can’t be filled. He can pour all his tears into it, and he has, more than once, over and over, and still it gnaws at him. He’s empty, and it hurts, and he can’t do anything about it. 

That’s also pretty familiar, for him.

Once he’s dried out, there’s not much more to do about it. He didn’t tell Dave anything; he didn’t save him from the proposal that’s going to bring him so much pain, or stop him from going to the war that’ll kill him. Klaus doomed him. Five should be proud.

He can’t bring himself to get up off of the floor of this little storage room he found. There’s water pooling in his ear and the hollow of his throat. He wonders idly how long it’ll take for that to dry. To disappear into the air like it was never there. How long it’d take for the same to happen to him, if he never moves from this spot. 

Dave saw him appear from nothing. Maybe Dave’s ghost was there, screaming out for Klaus to notice him through his haze of all-consuming grief as Klaus finally flipped open that briefcase. Maybe Dave had watched Klaus vanish, swept away to the future Klaus had never told him the truth about. Maybe Dave is still stuck wandering Vietnam, even more helpless to stop the destruction than he was before, his eyes finally open to the full catalog of horrors the war has to offer to those who can see what comes after.

Well, no, Dave’s not stuck there _now_. Not yet. In less than five year’s time, he’ll stroll into that cursed eternity because Klaus is the twist of fate that could have saved him, and he _didn’t._

He curls tighter around the hole inside of him as a new bout of tears wells up. He wants to believe that at some point, he’ll run out of them, but Klaus knows better.

The door bangs open. Klaus instinctively wipes his face, but he doesn’t move. He doesn’t have the energy to care that much.

“Here you are,” Five says, sounding annoyed. The reason it was hard to find Klaus is because he didn’t want to be easily found, so he doesn’t actually feel bad about it. 

“Here I am,” Klaus says dully into the carpet.

“Come on, get up, we’ve got to - what are you doing?”

Curled in the fetal position on the floor, cheeks still tacky from salty tear tracks. It’s a great question. What could Klaus possibly be doing?

“Rehearsing my stand-up routine.” He hears the door shut quietly, and Five comes around to stand in Klaus’ line of vision. “Do you think it’s going to be a problem that most of my humor is so topical? Not sure how it will play for a 1963 crowd.”

“The problem is that your humor isn’t funny,” Five says, but it’s softer than his usual biting tone. “Want to tell me what’s going on?”

Klaus’ waterlogged eyes are too heavy to climb up to his shortest brother’s face. He laughs a little at the idea of having this conversation - with any of his siblings, but especially with Five’s schoolboy socks. “Not really.” He heaves himself up, so at least he’s sitting, if not sitting up particularly straight. 

Five narrows his eyes, and that’s all it takes for Klaus to hear the lecture he’s about to get. 

“It’s fine!” Klaus says. “I didn’t break your rules, just because I’m a classic fuck-up doesn’t mean I’ll fuck up your thing. I didn’t do anything, okay?” He picks at the cracking aglet on his shoelace. The shoes he and his siblings are wearing are all that’s left of everything and everyone who was at that bowling alley. “I didn’t do anything.”

“Klaus.” If it wasn’t for the following sigh, it would almost sound like Five was trying to be understanding. “The apocalypse is a lot to deal with, obviously I get that. But we are going to fix it, if you just get up and come help us.”

Not everything. It’s a nice idea, but they can’t fix everything. That’s not even Five’s intention. 

Which is why, when Diego had stretched across some folding chairs to sleep the whiskey off, and Allison and Luther had started to fill Five in on what they had learned about the church where they’d landed (pretty much what they’d learned was that it was a church), Klaus had slipped away. The odd numbers were over-achieving the way they used to, back in the days of missions and strategy, and they weren’t going to listen to anything Klaus had to say, so there was no reason for him to stick around. Especially not when he’d had such pressing business to get to.

But here’s Five, so it looks like that’s a wrap on Klaus’ breakdown. Wouldn’t want to inconvenience anyone with it.

“Diego’s awake, and sober enough, and Vanya, so we can finally get to the plan.” Five taps his toe impatiently. “It takes you people way too long to get your shit together; we need to get moving.”

“Wait, wait.” Klaus pulls his knees a little closer to his chest. “Vanya’s up? And she’s - how is she?”

She’s his _sister,_ he’s knows that she’s not an inherently dangerous person. He’d prefer if the thought of interacting with her didn’t make his shoulders instinctively hunch up to make a smaller target. His chest is still pretty sore from whatever she did to it in the theatre, though, and he’d bet his brothers feel the same. And speaking of family, just because she’s one of Klaus’ siblings doesn’t mean that she won’t cause him physical harm.

Still, he hopes she’s alright.

“Yeah, she’s up. Freaked out for a minute there, but Allison calmed her down.” Five frowns. “I’m surprised you didn’t hear her.”

Klaus shrugs. He kind of had other stuff going on. Stuff he can’t really think too much about. His bottom lip starts to quiver, so he bites down and reminds himself that Five doesn’t know anything about it. He probably just thinks Klaus is high.

That’s a very different kind of hurt. “Okay, fine.” He pushes himself to his feet. It’s time for ‘The Hargreeves Try to Save The World,’ take three.

* * *

Vanya is simply not a passionate person. That’s what she’d figured, anyway, until stopping those fucking meds proved that her whole life had been a lie.

She doesn’t know herself, at all. She doesn’t know if she’s mad at her siblings, if she still wants them to pay for leaving her out for all these years, or if she should be grateful. It’s the first time she’s ever considered that, but also the first time that she’s ever used her super powerful superpowers to explode the moon and then hitched a ride back in time almost 60 years. 

There’s this ache inside, emptier than the medication had ever made her feel, and she thinks it’s because whatever source feeds her incredible newfound abilities is all tapped out, for the moment. She never knew she had it, but she’s never actively had to live without it before. 

When they tell her that they’re in 1963 because Five thinks it’s their best chance to stop the apocalypse, the one that she herself caused, she just accepts it. What else is there for her to do? She’s drained of the energy she’d need even to figure out what her reaction is. Five is talking about alternate realities and all Vanya can say is, “Okay.”

She’s grateful for the little paper cup of water Allison gave her. Her mouth is dry, but even more importantly, it’s something to fiddle with. Something to look at. If she looks up, all she can see is everybody looking at her. It’s too unusual, being the center of attention, for her to be comfortable with it.

“I need to hear all about everyone’s week,” Five says, “but especially yours, Vanya.”

She snaps her head up. “Oh.”

Five points at the bottom right part of his drawing on the chalkboard. The do-over 2019. “I need to know everything that happened the first time, so that I can make sure that the parts that lead to the world ending don’t happen that same way again.”

“How about your friends showing up at the house?” Diego says, with the voice and accusatory finger point that means he’s gearing up for a fight. 

“My friends?”

“Hazel and Cha Cha,” Klaus supplies. He seems subdued, where he’s sitting cross-legged on the floor. Allison and Luther had pulled up folding chairs, and Diego, of course, is pacing angrily like a lion in captivity.

“They shot up the house!” he says.

“And killed Mom,” Allison adds.

Diego stumbles over his agreement. It’s been a long time since Vanya’s heard his stutter that close to the surface.

“Alright, there’s that to change. What else?” Five scrawls the date of their break-in on the chalkboard. She remembers where she ended up sleeping that night, and feels a little sick.

“The stuff with Leonard, I guess.” She avoids looking at Allison. “I probably shouldn’t get so close to him so fast.” Or at all.

If he hadn’t been there, putting his agenda in her ear, would she have gotten so upset with Allison? Thank god Allison is alive, and okay. Five said it was something about the reconstruction process after a temporal displacement and how he might have missed some of their physical aspects since he’d had plenty on his mind. He’d started sounding frustrated about it, but Vanya wasn’t complaining. She might be missing a freckle on her finger, but still, it doesn’t seem like a glitch to her, for time travel to wipe away the worst mistake she’d ever made.

Second worst. 

But time travel is going to fix that, too. 

“Leonard realized that the weird stuff happening around me was my powers. He took me up to his grandmother’s cabin to learn how to use them better. That’s where Allison got hurt.”

There’d been so much blood. Her fingers had stuck together from it. The smell was overwhelming. She remembers it from the outside, though, like watching herself on a movie screen, stumbling dead eyed away from the body dying on the floor.

There’s news footage of Ben looking like that, absolutely soaked in the stuff after their first mission. Maybe that’s the Hargreeves family baptism. A confirmation of power.

“Wait.” Finally, she feels something, flames of anger sputtering to life to thaw the numb away. “You can’t just rewrite the past so I forget I have powers. I still have to get off my pills, I still have to know.”

“How many more times do I have to explain this,” Five mutters. It’s the kind of comment that most people make under their breath, but quiet has never been his style. “I’m not rewriting _your_ past. I am making a new future, with new versions of you. You will keep on existing just as you always have, and so will the new versions, but that week for them will go differently. Two separate timelines, two separate people. Okay?”

Like the Little Five and Big Five stick figures. Two Fives. 

And he wants to kill the other Five.

The question is hitting them all at once. Luther gets it out first. “So what happens to us?”

Five sets his shoulders before he responds. “Still working on that.”

In a burst of noise that makes Vanya flinch, the others start shouting. Not all of the others, she notices. Klaus, of all people, is uncharacteristically quiet, fidgeting and frowning into the middle distance.

“Alright!” Five bellows. He zaps across the room so he’s standing on a chair, maybe thinking more height will give him more authority. Maybe he’s right, Vanya certainly wouldn’t know. “Would you all calm the fuck down; we’re in a church for christ’s sake.”

Diego rolls his eyes. “Who gives a shit - ”

“We do, if we want to keep a low profile,” Five hisses. “These places are usually pretty quiet.”

That strikes a chord with her siblings. They respond better to tactical reasoning than respect for an authority figure that they can’t even see. 

In a mild tone, Klaus asks, “So are you planning on just leaving us here then?”

Fives speaks slowly and deliberately, like he’s talking to children. Which is aggravating, but despite appearances, compared to himself, it is sort of true. “You, me, all of us - we are all changes into this moment of time that weren’t here before. We are what makes the inflection point happen; the changes we cause is what keeps time in flux. The new timeline will keep branching away from the old one, but it won’t be set until we stop existing here. None of us can stay here.”

“Stop existing,” Diego repeats.

“We’ve all got to leave, or die, before the new timeline will replace the old one. All the variables get accounted for.”

“So, there will be doubles of us?” Vanya asks. “In 2019?” Six siblings are already exhausting enough.

Five shakes his head. “We’ll come up with a plan. Maybe find a place to bring you, out of time, or after.”

“After _time?”_ Allison says skeptically. “Five, I have to get back to my daughter.” She says it in that decisive tone she uses sometimes - not the one where she’s using her superpowers, but like she knows she’ll be heard anyway.

“This is more important - ” Five starts, but she cuts him off with a simple, “No.”

“Then what do you suggest?” he asks.

“We find another way.” Allison makes it sound like a certainty. “We have time - almost 50 years of it. We’ll find another way. That is not an option for me.”

“Preventing the end of life on earth isn’t ‘optional’ for me, either.”

He’s talking about Vanya. He’s not looking at her, or saying her name, but that’s what he’s talking about. The end of life on earth. It’s an overwhelming title, and it’s frightening, but it’s absolutely not ordinary. So is this what she’s always wanted, then?

“Why’d you bring us here?” Luther asks. “Just to get rid of us?” He sounds small, which is not a word Vanya has ever associated with him before. It’s hard to look at him.

“No, Luther, I don’t - ” Five’s voice is weary. “It’s not what I want to do. But I have to do _something.”_

Luther nods. “So we find another way. Like Allison said.”

“Not exactly overflowing with options here!”

Which is how the conversation continues, cycling around the same stances for at least another half an hour. The only thing that changes is that Diego starts to be on Five’s side. “If there’s a chance we can save people, I want to do it,” he says. Klaus and Vanya still haven’t had much input. She knows where she stands, though.

She’s been through so much. Not just that terrible week, but everything before then. Finally, she’d gotten the recognition of first chair; finally she’d felt like she fit into the world that had always been kept at arm’s reach. If there is a way to get back to that, Vanya chooses that.

When she announces it, Luther looks surprised, and she’s a little surprised herself to be voluntarily standing next to him. Allison smiles at her.

Luther asks, “What does Ben think?” and it hits Vanya with a jolt. She’d almost forgotten, she’d been a bit preoccupied when he’d made his appearance, and things haven’t really gotten less crazy since then. Ben is here, the unseen shadow at Klaus’ side.

Literally on Klaus’ right side, apparently. He glances that way before telling everyone, “Saving the world is important, and you guys don’t have a plan.”

“We’ll make one,” Luther says, starting up that whole cycle again, except he stops and stares when Klaus looks to the right again, shrugs, and says, “I don’t know.” Everyone is paused, held in thrall by the lure of hearing from their dearly departed brother. If Ben’s talking, Vanya thinks it’s only fair that she should be able to hear him too, now that she’s unlocked her sound powers, but that’s apparently still Klaus’ special thing.

Klaus addresses Luther. “Do you know anything about time travel?”

“Not really,” he admits, shifting awkwardly under the weight of everyone’s eyes. “But we can at least try.”

“I’m not wasting any more time,” Five declares. “You guys want to take the week to try and understand the complexities of the space-time continuum better than I do after 50 years, then go for it. But I’ve got to get started on the plan that is actually going to work.”

He turns back to the chalkboard, and it all feels so small. A kid in his schoolboy uniform, trying to save the world with his stick figure drawings and pitifully scarce list. ‘Keep Hazel and Cha Cha Away from the Academy’ and ‘Keep Away from Leonard - Pills Block Vanya’s Powers’ are the only things written on it.

“Maybe first we go and get some food?” Allison says to Luther and Vanya. “We’ll come up with a better plan once we’ve gotten something to eat.”

Five tells Diego, “We’re going to need maps and a lot of bus routes.”

“Okay then, we can find out if that big station on Calhoun is still around,” Diego says. “I mean, if it’s around already. Whatever.”

“We’ll all be sure to meet back here, say, tomorrow at nine?”

For the first time, Vanya is swept along with her siblings as they bustle out the door to get started on their missions. She can’t deny that it’s tense, but it’s also thrilling. She’s on the team, and not just any team, but One and Three.

Before they can get going, Klaus holds them back. “Wait, wait, hang on a second,” he says. He’s still sitting on the floor. “What happened to ‘don’t fuck everything up?’ What happened to keeping a low profile? If this family goes running around the city, that’s not going to happen.”

“There’s going to be some changes. Keep them small, keep away from changing anything that would affect our lives before March 24th.” Five makes sure to catch everyone’s eye. “That’s the most important thing. Keep our lives the same, so that I know what I’m getting into when I show up.” 

The air in the room is charged. Vanya’s never been big into movies, but she’s seen a sports flick or two and this moment feels like that - like the speech the coach gives before the big game. Then Five ruins it by shrugging and saying casually, “Hopefully the Commission won’t show up and kill us all.”

“Come on, Klaus.” Diego jerks his head towards the door. “Let’s go.”

Klaus huffs a high-pitched laugh. “You know what? I’ll pass.” 

Diego raises his eyebrows. “You got something better to do, bro?”

“Actually, yeah, I do.” Klaus slides past their shocked expressions and out the door. He throws the hand that says GOODBYE in the air as he goes. _“Na razie.”_

It shouldn’t still bother her. She shouldn’t be surprised by this sort of thing anymore, and this time, finally, she’s already included, instead of hoping in vain that she’ll be allowed to fill in the spot he carelessly left behind. And yet, old habits die hard - for both of them, apparently.

He leaves, and she watches him go. But this time, for the first time, she’s standing with the rest of her siblings.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Soooo I am aiming for a chapter a week, which I know is slow but I also know I can make that happen for a few weeks so I'm not going to push it. Thanks so much to everyone for commenting, it's always very exciting to get feedback and sometimes (thank you anglophile-rin!!<3) it even really helps! Hearing about something from the outside is valuable perspective and I'm jazzed about where this is going. 
> 
> And hey! You've now read the section that on my document is titled 'Klaus POV 1963 CRYING!!' so how much worse can things get :)
> 
> Chapter Four Sneak Peek:  
> “It’s hard to picture Five old,” Luther says. “I can only see him looking like this.”  
> “You know how much he would hate to hear that?” Allison snorts. “It’s perfect.”  
> Vanya looks stunned. “Did anyone else imagine him looking like Dad, or was that just me?”  
> “Like with a monocle?” That’s an impossible image.  
> “Ouch,” Allison laughs.


	4. Chapter Four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Five might disagree, but Luther’s not completely lost when it comes to scientific concepts. He’s not _Five_ , but he _was_ an astronaut; he _gets_ physical science on a bone-deep level, from four long years where a failure to fully understand it was a death sentence. But that’s space travel. Does time travel even follow the rules of physics?
> 
> That’s one of those questions where if you have to ask, it means there are probably a lot of other questions you need answered first, and you don’t even know what they are.

_Once in a 2016_

She doesn’t remember growing this fast when she was a kid. Normally, seeing the differences between Claire’s upbringing and her own is an extremely good thing. Time passing slowly, and seeing her family every day - those are the only parts of Allison’s childhood that she wishes she could still hang onto.

But time passes quickly, and Claire is so big now. A month ago, Allison left the country for a film, telling herself it was only four weeks, but four weeks was enough to Claire to develop some strong opinions about how she can do things _herself._ She won’t hear of sitting in a stroller or having Allison carry her as they go on a springtime walk together. 

Her legs are not long enough to get anywhere too quickly, even if she weren’t getting distracted by every flower. It’s not a problem. This walk could take all day, and Allison wouldn’t really mind.

She’s _so big_. It’s a strange kind of happiness, and a strange kind of grief. To miss the toddler who could get everything she needed even when the only word she said was, “Mommy,” and at the same time, to marvel at this amazing little kid who is telling her about the ‘daffodaisies’ that are blooming at the neighborhood park. To be so excited to meet all the future Claires, while already nostalgic about the one in front of her now.

“They are yellow and white. At the park, by the big tree,” Claire says. She’s carefully avoiding stepping on the chalk drawings on the sidewalk. Multicolored pastel stars, a mermaid, a sun and a house and a tree. “I want to find pink ones!”

“Pink daffodaisies?” Allison clarifies.

“Yes!” Claire squeals, reaching that high pitch that only little kids can. She hops the next few steps, buoyed by the pure enthusiasm that only little kids have. Adults lose that, somewhere along the way. Allison’s not sure if she or her siblings ever found it to begin with.

“I know if there are any pink flowers in that park, you’ll find them,” Allison says.

“Yeah,” Claire shrugs, like this unconditional support is natural. Allison loves that she can shrug like that. “Livvy says we can plant our own flowers outside our own house.”

“Of course you can! That’s a great idea.” Allison’s never done any gardening before, but it can’t be that hard. It sounds like Claire’s nanny knows enough about it.

“She says we have to wait until fall. And then they don’t even grow until next year!”

Fall. That settles that, then. She’ll be back in London doing reshoots for the movie she just wrapped principle on, sandwiched between filming the ‘Love On Loan’ sequel and a major press tour. Gardening will remain a mystery.

Coming up on a crosswalk, Allison reaches down for Claire’s hand. She’s frowning at something down the road. “What’s wrong, sweetie?”

“The construction,” Claire says, pointing. There’s a few guys in safety orange working around a manhole.

“I think they are fixing pipes, so that the houses have water. Do you want to ask them?” They’re about to walk past the group; just another block to go until the park. Claire nods.

She makes sure to push her dark sunglasses back up her nose before she calls out to the men. “Hi there! My daughter has a question for you, if you don’t mind.”

“Okay.” A man who reminds her of Diego steps forward. He’s got kind eyes. He crouches down to Claire’s level. “Is there something wrong?”

Allison starts to shake her head, but Claire says, “Yes.”

His eyes are more guarded now, but that feels like Diego, too. He’s probably worried that they’re about to throw an entitled hissy fit over something trivial, because in this zip code, that’s a common enough occurrence. She didn’t raise Claire to be like that, though. 

Well. She didn’t raise Claire much at all, not really.

“There’s no problem,” Allison begins. “Claire - ”

“Yes, there is.” Claire yanks at Allison’s hand. “They are in the street! We hold hands in the street. That’s how we stay safe.”

His face brightens with a wide grin. “That’s a very good point, Claire. Thank you for pointing that out.” He calls back to the others. “Did you hear that, guys? We haven’t been taking our safety seriously enough.”

Claire smiles at them, a little shyly now that everyone is looking at her. “You have to hold hands in the street.”

Which is why, when Allison and Claire turn the corner, they leave laughter in their wake. And four construction workers holding each other’s hands.

They don’t get through their whole excursion without some photographers showing up, desperate for pictures of Allison Hargreeves, superhero turned superstar. What they don’t know is that all of their praise is being lavished on the wrong person. Not quite four years old, but Claire is already doing more to make the world a better place than Allison ever has.

“I’m your biggest fan,” she tells her daughter as she hands over a bouquet of dandelions. Claire clutches them to her chest and giggles. Allison will do anything to hear that sound, but just because it got a laugh doesn’t mean it is a joke. 

President, founder, and lifetime member of the Claire Hargreeves Fan Club. It might not be her most well-known role, but it’s Allison’s favorite.

* * *

The problem is exactly what Ben said it would be: Luther doesn’t know anything about time travel. Neither do Allison and Vanya. They get all the way through walking to a restaurant, ordering, and are almost done with their meal, and still no one has even breached the topic. No one has any ideas for how to fix this one, because how could they?

Five might disagree, but Luther’s not completely lost when it comes to scientific concepts. He’s not _Five_ , but he _was_ an astronaut; he _gets_ physical science on a bone-deep level, from four long years where a failure to fully understand it was a death sentence. But that’s space travel. Does time travel even follow the rules of physics?

That’s one of those questions where if you have to ask, it means there are probably a lot of other questions you need answered first, and you don’t even know what they are.

He carefully saws into his stack of pancakes. He doesn’t feel like being careful, he feels like getting out some of his frustrations, and breakfast foods are a relatively harmless outlet. Except Luther isn’t ever truly harmless. He’s too big and too strong and too confused to be of much help, and when he’s not careful, he hurts. 

It’s been hard to look at Vanya. What is he supposed to say? He didn’t make the moon explode, not exactly. But ‘not exactly’ isn’t a strong enough alibi when it’s the end of the world you’re taking about.

He darts a look across the table at her. Both of the girls have clean plates; he’s the only one still eating. They’ve just been sitting in silence waiting for him to finish. An old habit, maybe. Get enough Hargreeves sharing a meal together, and it’s back to Dad’s old rules about talking at the table.

He didn’t get enough syrup, or something. The pancake is dry and hard to swallow. He washes it down with water and cuts a smaller bite as he says, “So, we need a better plan than Five’s.”

That gets him a pair of incredulous looks, which he can admit is what the comment deserves. The entire reason they are in this diner at all right now is because they all agree that they need a better plan than Five’s. He’s got a bigger point, though. “Two Fives in one room together might cause the apocalypse on its own.”

It’s not until he says the word that he realizes it could be a bad idea. It might technically be 50 years in the future, but it’s probably still too soon for apocalypse jokes. He shouldn’t be joking around anyway, he’s never been any good at it, not to mention currently woefully out of practice.

Vanya does wince, but then she smiles. Weakly, but a smile. 

Allison smiles, too. “I can’t even imagine,” she says. “Double the amount of belligerent energy.”

“It’s hard to picture him old,” Luther says. “I can only see him looking like this.”

“You know how much he would hate to hear that?” Allison snorts. “It’s perfect.”

Vanya looks stunned. “Did anyone else imagine him looking like Dad, or was that just me?”

“Like with a monocle?” That’s an impossible image.

“Ouch,” Allison laughs.

Vanya’s laughing too, and Luther is struck by the sheer impossibility of it all. That they’re in 1963, for one, and even more surprisingly, that they are sharing a sticky booth in a diner and getting along. Certainly it’s no thanks to him. He wants to apologize - he _needs_ to - but he doesn’t want to spoil this moment. It’s hard to know what to do about it; he hasn’t made the best choices lately.

Unexpectedly, an apology comes anyway, but not from him.

Allison says, “I should have said - I’m sorry we didn’t really listen to you. Turns out you were right about the moon being important.” 

He can’t finish these pancakes. He’s done eating. He pushes the plate aside.

“I have no idea how he could have known,” Allison continues, “but clearly, as always, Dad was a few steps ahead.”

“He wasn’t,” Luther says. The words tear out of his full throat easily enough, but he chokes with nothing else to say. 

The girls share a look. He wishes he didn’t know why, but there’s a clear answer. Luther’s never said anything negative about their father before.

“I guess you’re right,” Allison says, trying to bring back the light mood. “It’s not like you could have done anything to stop it from up there; you would have just - ”

Died. He would have died up there. Everyone at the table knows it, even when Allison doesn’t finish the thought.

‘But he made sure you came back,’ says the loyal voice in his head, the one that’s been with him since he was a kid and sounds like one, too. Except, Dad killed himself. He wasn’t in a position to ensure anything for anyone when he was dead. Dad just did what he wanted, and left it up to his children to figure out how to handle it.

“What an asshole,” Allison says.

Luther agrees. Not out loud, but maybe one day he’ll be able to.

That juvenile voice chimes in, as programmed as Grace, regurgitating Sir Reginald Hargreeves’ list of accomplishments. Industrialist, inventor, Olympic gold medalist - a great man who made the world a better place through determination and scientific advancement. At the very least, he’d know better than anyone at this table how to fix this problem.

“And he’s alive,” Luther says. They could go talk to him, they could ask for his help. The man wasn’t all the good things he liked to make people think he was, but he was brilliant - _is_ brilliant, right now.

“We should kill him,” Vanya says. 

If Luther had been drinking, he would have spat it out. Allison’s an actress, so she manages to avoid that, but the look on her face tells him this is a surprise to her as well. All he can say is, “What?”

“He almost left you up on the moon to die, he made Allison hide my powers and she almost died because of it. Even Five probably wouldn’t have ran away and got stuck and started this whole mess if Dad was less of a jerk.” Vanya shrugs. “We should kill him.”

“We can’t,” Allison says. The same words that are the only stuttering thought in Luther’s mind.

“He destroyed my life, and now you’re on his side?” The question ends close to a shout. 

Luther’s sure he’s not imagining the waves rippling through the drinks, or the clattering of silverware against the formica tabletop. 

She’s so small, but he’s still frightened of her, of this. It’s like an elephant being spooked by a mouse. A monkey being spooked by its really powerful, really angry sister.

Luckily, he has two sisters. “I didn’t say that,” Allison says, keeping her voice level. “I said you _can’t._ Five said that the most important thing was not to interfere with anything that would change our lives. Killing Dad before he even gets any of us would be a pretty big change.”

She’s right. It also puts the brakes on Luther’s idea of asking him for help, but that might be for the best. He doesn’t know what he would _say_. He hasn’t got a big cathartic speech planned out yet, and even if he did, he’s a little scared that seeing his father face-to-face might be enough to make him forget all his defiance.

But. “He could still help us, though.”

“Luther, seeing him at all is not - ”

“We don’t have to see him to use his library. He’s got so many books, he knew enough about this stuff to lecture Five about it. He might not have his whole collection yet, but it’s worth a try,” Luther says.

“What, and we sneak in?” Vanya asks. She’s wearing a small frown, but the ambience in the restaurant has calmed down considerably.

“Klaus used to do it all the time.” Luther doesn’t mention that the fact that he knows about it means that Klaus also got caught all the time. “It’s such a big house, it’s easy to not run into anyone for days.”

Allison reaches across the table and squeezes his hand. Her manicured nails are perfect, like the rest of her. They don’t match his grubby oversized fists. He smiles at her anyway.

“It’s worth a shot,” Allison says. “If we can be really careful to avoid getting spotted.”

It’s 1963, Dad probably doesn’t have his security system set up yet. Luther probably doesn’t need to mention it.

Allison goes on to point out, “He won’t recognize us, anyway.”

“Same old Dad,” Vanya mutters. But she’s not blowing anything up, she’s not shouting or threatening anyone. This actually might work; they might actually have a plan. That Luther helped to come up with.

First time for everything.

* * *

“There’s no way this is a good idea.” It’s a thing Ben finds himself saying often, although no one is usually listening, and that’s not just because most people can’t hear him. More because the one person who can listen almost universally chooses not to.

It’s no different now. It’s 1963, not an alternate universe. Or, maybe it sort of will be an alternate universe? That’s what it seems like Five was saying. Not alternate enough for Klaus to give common sense the time of day, of course. 

“What are you even planning to do here?” Ben asks. 

“No plan.” 

A passing woman glowers at Klaus under her towering bouffant, and he plasters on his ‘nothing to see here’ smile. Ben doesn’t know how convincing it is, when it’s coming from a guy who hasn’t yet managed to smudge his eyeliner completely away and won’t quit chewing on his fingernails. She doesn’t stop to hassle them, anyway, so that’s some kind of win.

“So you’ve traveled 60 years back in time and you’ve decided that instead of helping to stop the apocalypse, you’d rather hang around outside of a bar and do nothing at all?” When Klaus doesn’t respond, just stares across the street, Ben reiterates the important part. “Nothing at all to help stop _the apocalypse?”_

Klaus throws up his hands. “If you want to go haunt one of the others, have at it. I don’t need you hovering over my shoulder, _mon râleur.”_

It shouldn’t be possible for Ben to be let down by Klaus at this point. He’s spent over a decade in a front row seat, watching Klaus make selfish stupid choices, this isn’t some shocking twist he could never have seen coming. It still leaves him feeling gutted anyway.

Allison had spoken to him, Luther had asked for his opinion, like all it took for Ben to be back on the team was for people to know he was there. Foolishly, he’d let himself hope that this could be true, but the real truth is that it’s Klaus. It’s up to Klaus if Ben gets to playact at being alive, and it’s not only a question of his mostly nonexistent benevolence. 

Ben doesn’t want to haunt anyone, he wants to help. It’s Klaus who is content to let a road and door hold him at a distance while he lingers here, silent and unseen. Klaus always was the ghostly one, but of course nothing ever happens as expected with the Hargreeves family.

So, 1963, an almost alternate universe - no one could have seen this coming, and that shouldn’t be a surprise. 

“That guy, the bartender.” Ben jerks his head at the bar across the street. “That’s Dave, like the Dave from Vietnam, right? Your Dave?” He hadn’t missed the way Klaus had let the name slip, confident, coated with satin. Almost drunkenly, although he had hardly touched his drink at that point.

“He’s 23.”

Ben doesn’t roll his eyes, but only because he catches himself first. They’re talking about Klaus losing the man he fell in love with, and that’s a tender thing. Except for them, for Klaus and Ben, because death doesn’t mean the same things to them. “But that’s the guy who will be your Dave a few years from now?”

Klaus bobs his head from side to side. “Theoretically.”

At first, Ben thinks he’s being annoyingly pedantic, because annoying is a thing Klaus can do very well. It’s something in his eyes that makes Ben do a double take, something reminscent of how he had looked when he shambled back home after the most frightening few hours of Ben’s after-life. Time that Klaus had apparently spent falling in love.

This Dave guy is the reason why Klaus finally, _finally_ , decided to get sober, something that Ben was never able to be in the many years they’d been stuck together. There’s no telling what kind of crazy stunt Klaus might pull, when it comes to this guy.

“What do you mean, ‘theoretically?’ What are you thinking about doing?” He plants himself in the way of Klaus’ sightline. Sure, he isn’t corporeal, but to Klaus’ vision, he looks solid enough to make an impact.

Klaus takes a breath as if to speak, but lets it go and worries at his lower lip instead.

“Klaus!” Ben snaps at him. But he’s pretty sure what’s on Klaus’ mind. Ben knows him too well.

He only half says it, but it’s enough to prove Ben right. “He _dies_ there, Ben. He is going there to die. And even if he didn’t,” Klaus shakes his head, “it’s not a good place to go.”

Ben is shaking his head, too. “You can’t, Klaus.”

“ _Au contraire._ This might be the first time in my life that ‘doing nothing’ is the option that’s harder for me to do.” A glint of steel flashes in his demeanor as he says it, and Ben worries that he might have inadvertently pushed Klaus over the edge, in the wrong direction. It wouldn’t be the first time. 

“No, Klaus, come on.” Ben pleads. Fuck, he hates having to plead. “This is the apocalypse we are talking about here. You can do hard stuff, you did before.”

That’s not bullshit. Klaus did borderline impossible stuff in those last couple of days, including notably -though admittedly accidentally - making Ben corporeal. It’s a skill Ben is interested to explore more, because he’s pretty sure that he wouldn’t mind it becoming less impossible and accidental.

He’d saved Diego, back at the academy. The feeling of it - the fact that he _could feel_ any of it - was indescribable. He’d saved the others, too, at the theater, all of his siblings. That hadn’t been as tidy as yanking them to safety, though. That is something he needs to think more on. Still, Ben would rather have to sort through his complicated emotions about using his kind-of resurrection to rip people in half than not have that chance at all because the world explodes.

He’s not sure what will happen to him, if the world explodes. Maybe it’d be better, maybe the population would become like him and he’d be able to talk to people again. 

Probably not. It became clear long ago that he doesn’t work the same way most ghosts do. Something about Ben is wrong. It keeps him set apart, ‘special’ in death as he was in life. If anybody cares enough to ask, he’d like it to be clear for the record that he never asked for this.

Nobody asks, of course.

“No.” Klaus shakes his head, over and over, slow and stubborn. “No, that’s not it. This isn’t about all of that. Five said not to change things from before that week, but after he shows up in 2019 everything is going to change anyway.”

He’s either being difficult or he’s completely lost it. “It’s 1963, that’s before - ”

“Not for me,” Klaus cuts him off, and the moral quandary of a moment ago is forgotten as Ben fiercely wishes for the ability to land a punch again. His attention is fixed so firmly across the street that Klaus doesn’t notice Ben’s irritation. Just being visible is, of course, not enough of a reason for people to pay attention to Ben.

“I don’t meet him until later on, and they were talking about keeping Hazel and Cha Cha away from the house anyway,” Klaus says. “So in this new future, it might never even happen. I don’t think that changing this will hurt Five’s plan.”

Actually, that’s maybe probably true. If Five is right about how this timeline stuff works, and there’s no reason to think that he’s wrong beyond that just being how Hargreeves luck tends to go, well then Klaus might be right about this one.

Ben muses out loud. “His life changing could have big effects - I mean, it’s got to, it’s an entire life that wasn’t there in the first timeline.”

“But all of it could. Anything we touch while we’re here. That’s factored in, an acceptable risk.”

“It’s on purpose meddling, though. That’s not exactly the same thing.”

Klaus inclines his head, like he’s granting the point, but his jaw sets. “I don’t think it breaks Five’s rules. He’s not a part of my life until after March 24th.”

It’s not as if Ben could do anything to stop him if he thinks Klaus is wrong, but he’s got to admit, he does sound right about this. He’s clearly given it a lot of thought. 

But, “If you’re so sure, why haven’t you just gone over there and told him already?”

First, he hesitates, then Klaus starts fidgeting. He stays quiet, though, and that’s frustrating because once this is done, presumably, they can get back to the actually quite pressing business of saving the world. It settles over him slowly, a realization that is somehow cold and slick and reminiscent of the Horror.

“But if you stop him, then he won’t ever be a part of your life,” Ben says. It’s a statement, but it goes up at the end like a question. 

Klaus stays quiet.

That’s something Ben simply doesn’t have a response for. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took longer to get up! It's partially because I spent the whole weekend editing tua vids (which, you know, if you want to check out, [they are here](https://hermitreunited.tumblr.com/tagged/tua-vids)). But then, OOOF that TRAILER HUH??? so I had to get this chapter up. I _can't tell you_ what it feels like to watch the trailer and be like 'but I'm doing that too!!!' (hello Reginald yes I see you being alive)
> 
> But I guess you will all see what I mean as more chapters post <3
> 
> Oh also I know that this chapter and the one previous open with a flashforebacksideways thing, but they won't ALL do that, just these two did.
> 
> also, hey. hi. hello. you can come to my tumblr and talk about that trailer if you wanna because like. god. I am insane about all of it.
> 
> Chapter Five Sneak Peek:
> 
> “Smoke break,” he says.
> 
> “Been a long smoke break. And you don’t even have a cigarette,” Dave points out.
> 
> Klaus shrugs. “That’s why it’s taking so long. Don’t have all the equipment.” His voice is as Dave remembers it, softer and lighter than expected from a person with such a wild appearance.
> 
> “Maybe it’s time to let that lost cause go.”


	5. Chapter Five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “If you had a chance to prevent pain, the right thing to do is to stop it, isn’t it?” He stops swirling the straw in his drink and focuses on Dave. “That’s what you would do.”
> 
> It sounds like a question. Or, it sounds like it should be a question.

Probably Diego should have realized that he wasn’t going to get the chance to play to his strengths much on this one, back at the very beginning, when Five had said that their plan was to get a bunch of maps. He’d at least been helpful directing their way to the historic old depot - not so historic or old, yet - and then to a library, armed with all the bus schedules they could find.

There’s no guarantee the others are doing anything better. They didn’t even have a plan when they split up, and working with both Luther and Vanya together doesn’t sound fun. But they don’t seem to be in the library right now, and Diego would love for that to be true of him, too.

Aren’t libraries supposed to be quiet? Closing books shouldn’t be so _loud_. He wants to eat a sloppy bacon cheeseburger, and also to never eat anything again.

He shoves away the map he’s been staring blankly at. “What the hell are we doing here, Five?”

“You do know how to read a map?” Each word is soaked in condescension. Maybe Diego _would_ have been better off trying to team up with Luther.

“You’re such a prick,” Diego says. A college-aged woman walking past their table gasps in shock, and he grins at her until she keeps moving. “I want to know _why._ What is the actual plan here? You want to get to” - he snatches up the paper Five has in front of him - “Texas? On a bus?”

“Yup.” Five plucks the schedule back.

“Did the time travel mess with your head? You remember you can teleport, right?”

“It’s over one thousand miles, genius. And then I have to time travel fifty years, again, and, oh yeah, stop the apocalypse.” Five rolls his eyes. “You’ve got superpowers, why don’t you just throw a knife all the way from here to Dallas for me.”

Diego’s powers don’t turn knives into guided missiles over long distances like that. He knows this for certain, because their father spent a fruitless year attempting to change that fact. Diego was nine and Reginald called it training, because his biggest problem with experimenting on children was the sound of the words, not the actual process.

“Okay, so you’re taking a bus,” Diego says. “There’s plenty. Let’s just pick one.”

“I’m going to be in that city. It’s a huge job for the commission, so they are on high alert. I’m on high alert since I’m planning on finally jumping home - the old me, the - ”

“The you that’s taller.” If Five wants to give him shit about being stupid, Diego can give him some about being tiny.

Five bares his teeth in a way that might be intimidating if Diego was a person who could be intimidated by his tiny little preteen grandpa brother. “Yes, the one that’s taller. The point is, we have to be very careful about whose attention we attract. Ideally, nobody’s.”

“Okay.” Diego doesn’t often opt for it, but that doesn’t mean he needs the concept of ‘stealth’ explained to him. “So which do you think is more suspicious: the greyhound that passes through Little Rock on Wednesday afternoon, or the one through Kansas City on Thursday morning?”

He means it as a joke, because it absolutely cannot matter, but Five responds with venom, like Diego is the one being ridiculous. “I don’t know yet Diego, that’s what I’m trying to figure out.”

He raises his eyebrows, a look that asks, ‘are you done talking?’ Then he’s back to being completely absorbed in cross country bus routes. Because that’s what they are supposed to be doing, apparently.

“Terrific,” Diego sighs.

Five pointedly doesn’t look up; maybe he’s figuring if he doesn’t acknowledge Diego’s presence, he won’t risk starting up more conversation.

So that’s just great. Really great. It’s time to stop the end of the world and Diego’s sitting on his ass and getting studiously ignored. He’s giving up everything to help Five with this, but he’s not even helping. He’s not doing _anything._

’Giving up everything’ is sort of a stretch. Most everything he cares about is already gone. His mom, Eudora... If Five can go back and prevent that week, they could still live. Even if Diego himself won’t be there to see them. They’ll still live. Diego will do whatever it takes to make that happen.

It’s just that it’d be nice if it took _something._ Instead of just sitting here.

When he found her, he wasn’t able to do anything. He doesn’t even really know how long she was lying there, before he found her, and then left her. It couldn’t have been too long, with the police response right on his heels. He’d only barely missed it. If it hadn’t taken so long for Diego to find Five, if she’d only waited a few minutes…

Dwelling on ‘ifs’ from the past doesn’t fix anything, Diego knows that. He usually channels this kind of anger into moving forward even faster, punching even harder at the villains he can still stop. You can’t change the past, but then, this isn’t exactly the past that he’s thinking about right now.

Five can spend all his energy on bus routes if that’s what he wants to change about the future, but Diego’s got other stuff on his mind.

He needs Klaus. Eudora had thought Klaus was there, in the motel where she was killed, and Klaus had said he recognized the big guy. That’s not _all_ Klaus said about him, but Diego isn’t - he can’t get into all of that right now. Diego just needs more information so he can learn exactly how to stop it from happening, and Klaus might know, so he needs Klaus. But Klaus struck out on his own.

It’s bothering Diego more than he’d ever admit. And of course, it’s totally baseless. They were reunited for hardly more than a week, that’s not long enough to form traditions, much less feel betrayed by Klaus ‘breaking’ one. Still. He thought they were a team. Out of all of them, through all of the dumb bullshit that their lives had thrown at them, one thing that stayed the same was that the two of them would back each other up if asked.

Watching Klaus slink out of the room, like _he_ was the one being let down - it had hurt.

Being mad about it leads to questions, though, like ‘what does Klaus have to be upset about?’ He probably knows the answer; it’s probably to do with those things Diego can’t think about.

Diego hadn’t known about it and hadn’t stopped it, and then Klaus had recognized Hazel and said it was because he’d been tortured and nearly killed, and Diego had just accepted it because there was so much going on. It’s unacceptable, he gets that. And now Diego is dicking around in a library with Five, exactly the same as before, and that’s exactly what they are supposed to be avoiding.

Here’s a change, then. “Where do you think Klaus could have got to?”

* * *

Klaus is here. That guy Klaus with his green eyes and his disconcertingly prescient questions. He’s across the street, has been for a while.

It’s weird. For a lot of reasons. All day, Dave has been turning the memory over in his mind, wondering if maybe it had just been some kind of waking dream. Between his day job and working the late shifts here, he’s not getting as much sleep as he’s used to. The otherworldliness of Klaus, with his oversaturated colors and strange familiarity - he makes more sense as a fantasy than a real experience.

It also seems like a solid explanation for the way their conversation had veered so wildly and pointedly towards his relationship with Annie. If Klaus was some random patron, that was weird. If it was his subconscious giving him a kick in the pants, well, Dave probably deserved that. Because Annie deserved it.

He’d nearly accepted that as the explanation, and resolved to propose, and soon. Come up with a way to propose, anyway, and figure out what to do about a ring. But now Klaus is here, again, and Dave can’t decide if that makes him more or less likely to be a figment of Dave’s imagination.

He’s standing on the corner, and has been for at least an hour. Between orders, Dave has been watching Klaus out there, talking - except he’s not with his friend this time. He’s by himself, talking to the air. Air that is growing frigid, because it’s November, and the guy is wearing the same clothes as before which is to say he doesn’t even have any sleeves.

That’s the reason, more than anything else, why Dave goes out there when he gets a break. It’s cold, and no one should be stuck out on a street corner when it gets this cold.

He feels slightly guilty for shrugging his coat on before he steps outside.

It’s not a busy area, luckily, so he can jaywalk directly to Klaus’ side instead of having to stare awkwardly at each other waiting for cars to pass and lights to change. He’s a rebel, he doesn’t have to wait for a green light to go.

“What are you doing out here?”

For the a briefest moment, Klaus looks greenish at the sight of him, like he’s swallowed something he shouldn’t have and is going to be sick. It falls away quickly, though, banished by a blinding smile. “Smoke break,” he says.

“Been a long smoke break. And you don’t even have a cigarette,” Dave points out.

Klaus shrugs. “That’s why it’s taking so long. Don’t have all the equipment.” His voice is as Dave remembers it, softer and lighter than expected from a person with such a wild appearance.

“Maybe it’s time to let that lost cause go.” He’s only continuing on with the banter, and Klaus laughs, but he winces, too. Dave gestures to the bar behind him. “I just mean that it’s warmer inside, and I can make you another terrible drink.”

“Tempting.” Dave doesn’t doubt that Klaus is telling the truth; he looks as split as a person can be, indecision shadowing his otherwise open expression. “I don’t have any cash, though.”

How could he, in those pants? Skintight, lace-up black leather doesn’t leave much room for imagination, or a wallet. “That’s alright, with the amount you overpaid last night, I owe you one.”

Dave doesn’t understand the reaction Klaus has to that comment, either. A pained grin, a shaky sigh, a searching gaze turned up to the darkening sky. He finds some kind of answer there, one that makes him screw his eyes shut and nod. “Okay, okay,” he says, and it’s only when he makes eye contact that Dave realizes the words are a response to him.

It’s all so much, such intensity, and it’s only the second time they’ve ever chatted. Klaus goes quiet as they head in, long enough for Dave to question why on earth he’s doing this. There’s not a ton of other patrons in anymore, but if Dave is going insane and has a conversation with an empty barstool, some of them will definitely notice. If he’s not, then Klaus is the insane one, and Dave just invited him in for free liquor, and again, the question is _why._

All it takes to figure it out is for Klaus to smile his thanks when Dave pushes him a drink. It’s an incredibly genuine smile; it’s clearly not because that’s what this highball deserves. And it’s not quite a smile, it’s an expression that runs deeper than that. It’s a smile that’s happy to be here, but aches for something else, something more.

It’s a smile that he’s seen before on Annie.

But no, there can’t be similarities between Annie and Klaus. Annie has kind eyes and a sharp sense of humor that took Dave by surprise. Her hair is thick and soft and dark, the kind that Dave would gladly comb his fingers through for hours, if only it were short enough to stay untangled.

Annie has this way of pulling people in. He’s never heard anyone with anything bad to say about her. He thinks it’s because she knows how to tell a story, but when it’s not her turn, she really _listens_ when people talk. Everybody probably falls a little in love with her once she’s turned that brilliant attention on them.

Annie is all of these things and Dave’s soon-to-be fiancé, so how can there be any comparison? Klaus is a man. And his kind eyes are stunningly, spectacularly green, not brown.

So that’s that, then.

Those stunning spectacular eyes are staring at him now. When Dave notices, they widen and dart away, but they sneak a hesitating path back, and then it’s Dave’s turn to look away. Neither of them have spoken yet, or made any move to.

Walter taps the bar top while clearing his throat, a sure sign that he’s been trying to get Dave’s attention for a while.

They exchange some chatter, about the job, about the missus. Usually, Dave enjoys this sort of thing. The older guys that come in here, mostly they tell the same stories and chuckle at the same jokes, but that can be comforting, in its way. Tonight, he can hardly stand it. Klaus’ presence to his right is constant and burning, and listening to Walter’s genial complaints about his wife’s cooking feels like trying to ignore the sun when it’s sitting a few feet behind his shoulder.

His ‘oh boys’ and his ‘sounds like its’ are distracted, so they come piling out too close and obviously repetitive. Not that Walter seems to mind, or notice. His story drags to the same conclusion as it always does, that you’ve got to be careful with Jean’s meatloaf, but he can live with that for as long as she keeps putting up with all of his malarkey. But finally, finally, they reach the end of this little ritual. Dave says, “Probably a good idea,” and Walter chuckles and ambles back to his usual table.

Klaus is watching him, when he turns back. For some reason, it makes the back of Dave’s neck hot with something like embarrassment, even though of course Klaus should be looking at him, he invited the guy in for a drink. He’s here as Dave’s friend, of course, so of course he’s looking at Dave. He’s not able to stop himself from asking, “What?”

“It’s nice to see you looking so - ” Klaus shakes his head, like he’s marveling at some kind of private joke. “You seem happy. Like you like your job. That’s really great.”

“Oh, sure,” Dave agrees. At least four light responses are immediately at hand, but the rote banter that he exchanges with the patrons here just doesn’t work with Klaus. The moment stays quiet, and stretches long.

Then, “I was thinking,” Klaus says, “about some things you said. Avoiding hard painful things just makes the pain last longer.”

Dave has been thinking about their conversation a lot too. Granted, Dave’s own words weren’t the ones that have been stuck in his mind, but he’s pretty sure he didn’t say anything like that at all.

“And it’s true. It’s never been my M.O. but that’s because I’m basically a coward.” Klaus shrugs, maybe to prove that this self-determined weakness doesn’t bother him. “If you had a chance to prevent pain, the right thing to do is to stop it, isn’t it?” He stops swirling the straw in his drink and focuses on Dave. “That’s what you would do.”

It sounds like a question. Or, it sounds like it should be a question.

And it’s hard to say, really. As a hypothetical, it’s easy to just say yes, do the right thing. But there’s something about those clear green eyes - they make Dave reach for honesty. “When you say it like that, it sounds like it should be an easy yes,” he agrees, “but I think things are usually more complicated than that.”

“Ah.” Klaus rocks back in his seat. “True. That’s true.”

With that, it seems that Klaus is lost in his thoughts again. Dave should really go and chat with Walter some more, or mix George another gin and tonic, because he always gets a third if he’s still here at this point in the evening. It’s just that Klaus’ drink is on the house, which is to say, it’s on Dave, and he should really be saving up, if he wants to afford a ring.

He stays, polishing the same rack of clean glasses.

“Sometimes,” Klaus says, “even when the whole world is saying that things should be one way, that doesn’t mean they’re right. Or that you are wrong.”

Dave is trying to follow along but it’s a struggle. “So, is the whole world saying that, what, you should let the pain keep on going?”

For a second, Klaus looks confused, which is only fair. Taste of his own medicine and all that. But apparently those thoughts were less connected than Dave thought. Thoughtfully, Klaus says, “Sometimes, maybe.”

Dave nods and says, “Okay,” because he doesn’t know what else to do. The bartender strategy for getting out of a conversation is to suggest another drink, but again, Klaus’ glass is full.

The chain around Klaus’ neck doesn’t make a sound when he clenches his dog tags in his fist. “Fuck it,” he says. “I’m just going to say it, fuck it. Don’t go to Vietnam.”

The straightforward tone he uses is incredibly misleading.

“You thought about our conversation last night, and it made you want to tell me not to go to Vietnam.”

Klaus grimaces. “Yes.” His expression makes it clear that he knows how stupid this sounds. This awareness doesn’t have Dave feeling more forgiving though; it’s actually the opposite.

“Okay, well, thanks,” he says. “I’ll scratch that off the list of possible places to honeymoon.”

“Don’t do that either,” Klaus blurts out.

“So you want me to - ”

“Not honeymoon. Not do any of it. You shouldn’t propose to Annie. You’ll regret it.”

Klaus looks a little bit desperate and apologetic, like he gets how crazy this all sounds. But he’s still here, he’s still saying all these crazy sounding things. Even if it looks like he wants to stuff the words back into his mouth as soon as he says them, he still did choose to come to the place where Dave works and say it anyway. It’s actually kind of pissing Dave off.

“You shouldn’t talk about that.” Before Klaus even has time to ask, he clarifies. “Weddings and proposals. Marriage. You can’t possibly have any experience with that kind of thing.”

Klaus smirks, but there’s something off with it. It’s curdled, frozen, good humor gone sour. “Not pretty enough, you think?”

Dave can’t answer that. That’s not something he can answer. Even - especially - with the beguiling way that Klaus coats the barb. He tilts his head so when he looks at Dave, it’s through a coy curtain of long dark lashes. He’s terribly concerningly distractingly good at the maneuver.

No one seems to be paying them much attention, but Dave lowers his voice to a whisper anyway. He doesn’t want to make any trouble for Klaus. “You _know_ why.”

Klaus follows suit, leaning in. “Then you know why you shouldn’t propose.”

He’s wrong, of course. Dave doesn’t have any idea what he’s even talking about. It’s not true.

“Dave.”

“I never told you my name.” Dave’s not sure exactly what he is accusing Klaus of, but he is sure that he’s right about this. Even now, even when it’s stretched into two sing-song syllables, the sound of his name in Klaus’ feathery voice makes Dave shiver. He never told Klaus his name, and yet here he is, pronouncing it like _that_ anyway.

“And I never told you a lot of things.”

He says it so quick; he’s so snappy and cryptic and sure of himself. This cocky cryptic bastard. Dave’s had enough. “I’m going on break; come on.”

Klaus mutters, “I thought you just took a break,” but he hardly puts up any resistance. Dave probably doesn’t need to, but he pulls Klaus along with him through the kitchen. His fingertips rest, ever so lightly, on the delicate, cool skin on the inside of Klaus’ wrist.

The alley smells like rotted food and piss. Dave doesn’t like it back here even when the gusts of wind that whip between the buildings aren’t so cold they make him choke, but there’s no one out here to hear them, and at the moment, discretion seems like the most important thing. Besides, Klaus doesn’t seem to mind.

“I want answers,” Dave says, “real answers. There’s no one else around, so you can just be straight with me.”

Klaus laughs a little. “You know why I can’t do that, either.”

Dave lets go of Klaus’ hand, pushing it away from him like it’s infectious. “What are you talking about?” He’s not a particularly violent person; the last fight he was in barely qualifies as one, just breaking up a quarrel between two crotchety drunk men. When he shoves Klaus, he is distantly surprised by the force of his response. “Just tell me what you want to say.”

“Okay, okay.” Klaus puts his hands up in a gesture of surrender as he stumbles backwards, and Dave can finally read the HELLO and GOODBYE printed on them. A chill that has nothing to do with the temperature burrows its way into Dave’s spine. He’s reminded of late nights with his cousins and the ouija board that had freaked out his aunt. The spooky thrill of the scariest moments back then have got nothing on Dave’s present.

It gets worse. “Don’t propose to Annie,” Klaus says. “Don’t go fight in the Vietnam War. Don’t do these things just because you feel that you are supposed to.”

The craziest part of that set of instructions is how they are paired together as if they are both equally likely. The second most insane part is that this random guy thinks he can give Dave instructions. And the Vietnam War? What does that have to do with anything?

A windowless work van pulls into the alley over Klaus’ shoulder, and the frightening feeling doesn’t go away, but the genre shifts. Go against the grain, don’t listen to society, don’t get married and don’t support your country. He has no idea why he would be the target of a some kind of commie spy scheme, but he figures he better distance himself as much as he can. “I don’t know what you are talking about.”

“You’re too gay to propose to your girlfriend, Dave!” Klaus says it much too loudly. “You regret it.”

He’s saying this _now,_ now that someone is getting out of the van. Dave came out here so that they wouldn’t be overheard. “Keep your voice down,” he hisses. The look Klaus gives him, maybe it’s mourning, maybe it’s pity. Either way, it’s not a reaction Dave expected.

Then Klaus puts together that there must be someone there, and he turns around, and unexpected hardly even begins to cover it.

Klaus murmurs, “Oh fuck, not again,” and ducks to the ground with his arms over his head. Dave doesn’t even notice the gun until after it goes off. Even in the dying light, the silver glints in the man’s outstretched hand. In his other hand, he’s carrying a briefcase.

He doesn’t know where the bullet went, not into him, and seemingly not into Klaus, who is already tackling the guy. The guy who just shot a gun. That just happened, although Dave is still struggling to believe it.

In the scuffle, Klaus manages to knock the handgun out of the man’s grasp, sending it skittering down the alleyway right near Dave’s feet. Without thinking, Dave kicks it, away from the fighting, underneath a dumpster. Once his brain catches up, he realizes maybe he should have picked it up and used it somehow, but he’s never touched a gun before, he doesn’t know where to start.

And Klaus seems to be doing okay for himself. His opponent may be brawny, but he’s quick and stronger than he looks. They are trading blows faster than Dave has ever seen in real life. He never would have guessed, what with Klaus’ strange appearance and wispy voice, but he fights as though he’s been trained.

Klaus jams his foot into the man’s shin and brings him down. The noise of elation Dave makes is how he realizes that he has apparently picked a side, and for some reason, he’s rooting for Klaus.

‘Rooting for’ isn’t the same as ‘helpful,’ because it draws Klaus’ attention. The other man lurches to his feet and swings his briefcase into Klaus’ back. The weight of the impact means the thing is much heavier than Dave would have guessed, and Klaus falls, hard.

Dave’s no match for either of these men, that much is obvious. Maybe if he hadn’t panicked and had kept hold of the gun, maybe he could help. Klaus could use some help; he tries to push himself up but crashes back to the ground when the man kicks him in the side. And again. It makes Dave feel sick, but undoubtedly, Klaus feels worse.

He’s hauled up to unsteady feet and forced to stumble down the alleyway. Towards the van, Dave realizes, a split second before Klaus does. He struggles to break free from the hold the man has on him, but panic makes his movements more frenzied than effective. Like the flick of a switch, an elbow to the face renders him too disoriented to fight back. All Klaus can do as he is shoved into the van is to mumble his protests.

Dave can’t do anything, but he has to do something. He steps forward. “Excuse me.” It sounds weak and is dumb and certainly anything else would have been better. He’s acting as if this is some kind of respectable police constable he’s talking to, when this is _literally_ back alley shit.

The man swivels to look at him with surprise, as though he had forgotten Dave was there, or maybe he hadn’t realized before. It’s not like Dave has really done much to intervene, before now.

Klaus uses the distraction to renew his struggles, but with the man’s fist in his hair, it’s not enough. The metallic sound echoes in the alley, but Klaus himself only lets out a tiny gasp when his head is smashed into the frame of the car door. The pain of it doesn’t get the same level of response that the threat of being taken away does. Dave doesn’t know what that means, really, but he knows that it’s bad.

“I don’t think you should do that,” Dave says - ineffectively, of course, and too late. The second hit is all it takes for Klaus to finally stop moving.

Then the man straightens up, and turns towards Dave. He manages to duck, once, which is really better than could have been expected. Time stretches slow as the large fist speeds toward him, just enough that he has time to think, ‘I knew this wouldn’t last long,’ before the world goes dark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay so yes I am getting sloooower on the updates, I'm _sorry!_ But frankly it's only likely to get slower from here. We are going to have an entire new season next week and that will probably take up most of my brain power. So, sorry (sort of) for the little cliffhanger that you might be stuck with for a while!
> 
> Chapter Six Sneak Peek (kind of maybe a mean one):
> 
> Dave’s never woken up like this before.


	6. Chapter Six

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Not for the first time, Allison reflects that these really are the two worst people she could be here with. The others all hate Reginald, but they’ve had plenty of time to let that rage cool down to a simmer. Neither Vanya or Luther were fully aware of the extent to which he stole away their lives, much less come to terms with it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes I know no one is going to read this for _at least_ a week but I'm hype rn anyway and also sometimes you just want to put out one more chapter before the show to prove that YES you had some of these same ideas _before_ the show did it!!
> 
> Enjoy your binge, babes. PLEASE come talk to me about it. <3

“He never actually sold umbrellas, did he?”

“I mean, I didn’t think so.”

They are standing across the street from the block of buildings where they spent their entire childhood. Where Luther spent almost his entire life. The door that they used for sneaking out to the donut shop has a sign posted above it proclaiming that umbrellas are for sale inside. It doesn’t really matter, but they are talking about it anyway, because none of them wants to venture in.

“You can’t make a billion dollars with umbrellas,” Vanya continues.

Allison’s not so sure. What with the exclusive interviews, comic book rights, and all the merchandise, not to mention the “gifts of gratitude” he’d often receive to thank his super kids for saving the day… The thing about being rich is that money just adds up.

She keeps this thought to herself. Sometimes, it’s a better choice to just stay quiet. On top of her childhood training, she had been an actress for years. She knows the importance of picking her words carefully.

Considering words - past tense, ‘had been an actress,’ that’s very interesting. Not because it’s technically the future, or some other timeline, or something. It’s just emotionally and unthinkingly something that Allison used to be, not something that she is now. She doesn’t know when that happened. Before 1963, though. If they get home, she’ll need to figure out what and who she is now. Now, in the future. Who the current version of herself is, half a century in the future.

Everything is overwhelming and exhausting to think about, once time travel gets involved. No wonder Five is so dependent on his coffee.

“We could just knock on the door,” Luther says. “He doesn’t know who we are, we could just walk up and ask him.”

Vanya scoffs. “Oh, sure. ‘Come on in and use my library, you ordinary people from off the street.’ That sounds like dad.”

Not for the first time, Allison reflects that these really are the two worst people she could be here with. The others all hate Reginald, but they’ve had plenty of time to let that rage cool down to a simmer. Neither Vanya or Luther were fully aware of the extent to which he stole away their lives, much less come to terms with it. Luckily, there’s no need for them to have to see their father at all.

“I think the less we interact with him or anyone else, the less changes we’ll make to the timeline,” Allison says. “We should sneak in.” She lays a comforting hand on Luther’s arm. His grateful smile is fleeting and weak, but the deep line of worry between his eyes lightens somewhat, and she’ll take whatever little victory she can get.

On the east side of the block, there was a disused attic space that overlooked an alley that twisted its strange path through the cobbled together mansion. Allison used to smoke her secret cigarettes up there and watch Klaus clamber down a fire escape, leaving her behind in search of something stronger than nicotine. That’s the academy’s weak spot; that’s how they’ll get in.

Assuming that the house was still that way in 1963, anyway. Or, that the house is constructed that way now, in 1963, she means. Caffeine or nicotine, Allison would happily take either.

The point is that it’s possible that Reginald hasn’t yet bought up that part of the block. This entire plan is such a long shot that it shouldn’t even be considered a plan. A lot of things can change in fifty years.

A lot can change in a lot less.

But it’s all there, the crooked alleyway and the fire escape and the unlocked window. They slip inside, and Allison does everything she can to not even think the words ‘too easy,’ but then, thoughts are a hard thing to forbid. Her skill has never been controlling her own mind.

Instinctively, they file into the narrow stairwell and down to the ground floor. That was the best way to go when you didn’t want to be found out. If their father was home, he’d be in his office on the second floor, and with Pogo’s room and the laundry being below in the basement, Pogo and Grace had good reason to be down there; the kids did not. They aren’t kids now though, and Grace and Pogo aren’t here. They aren’t even here in the future that Allison’s trying to get back to.

This may be Allison’s first official trip through timelines, but this house has always felt like a place where the rules of time don’t work properly. The academy that she’s most familiar with is the one that she’s carried with her since the day she left it behind, the one she’s known for almost 30 years. She carefully never worked on a show that filmed in this city so she didn’t have to deal with questions about why she never visited home. Allison didn’t feel the need to tell the world about their abusive childhood.

Then, just within the past week, there’s been so many different versions of this place, like it needed to cram decades worth of change into only a few days. There’s the one that she returned to for the funeral, with an outside that looked the same as she remembered, but a different inside. The house was more of a home, without Dad in it. And the one where there was no distinction between inside or outside, just dust and rubble, with Mom and Pogo buried under the ruins that have apparently been haunting Five ever since he ran away. Now there’s this, the 1960s academy, eerie in its familiarities.

Eerie for more than just that. It’s so quiet. Not that it was never quiet when they were kids. The Hargreeves siblings have always excelled at chaos, but whenever he was bothered enough to notice them, their father insisted on order. There’s a difference, though, between seven kids living in uniformed silence, and this emptiness.

Allison still has the memories of these walls coming down around her, the ghosts of destruction yet to come. No one has died here yet, but it feels like a tomb. Is that what Klaus feels like all the time, everywhere?

They creep past a hallway that was one of the first to go, fifty years from now. It leads up from the basement. Vanya doesn’t even give it a second glance, and Allison can’t decide if that’s a good sign or not.

Decidedly _not_ a good sign is the fact that the restricted library isn’t in the same place that it was, or will be. It’s just an old storage room, dusty boxes of cheap laundry detergent lining rickety metal shelves.

“Well,” Luther sighs, but doesn’t go any further. Which fits in with the rest of this ‘plan,’ really. One short idea, and no follow-up.

“We could just search the whole place,” Vanya offers, sounding unconvinced.

Because, of course not. The house is huge, and even if they find the right collection of books, that’s huge too. How are they going to find the answers they need? They barely even know what answers they are looking for, and they’re supposed to be reconvening with the others and pitching their plan in the morning. Luther’s expression says he’s thinking the same thing.

It’s a toss-up, who will break and say, “What do we do now?” first. Allison’s got her money on Vanya. She’s wrong, because the next voice doesn’t belong to any of the three of them.

“Number One! What is the meaning of this?”

Apologies spring to mind first, an automatic response to that tone in that voice. A half second behind is the drowning realization that they’ve really fucked up Five’s plan. That leaves Allison uncharacteristically speechless when she turns to see their dad standing stiffly in the doorway.

“Explain yourself,” he demands. He asking Luther, because of course he never will give Allison or Vanya the time of day, but Luther - there’s no way he’s ready for this, to come to face to face with Dad after spending a lifetime following starstruck after him, and less than a week with that blinding light finally snuffed out. There’s no way that this can be explained, either, but that’s a secondary issue, as far as Allison is concerned.

Then Luther throws a punch and their dad is out like a light.

In unison, Allison and Vanya exclaim, “Holy shit!”

Luther shrugs his massive shoulder and somehow looks small anyway. “I didn’t know what else to do.” There’s a note of panicked apology in his voice, but at least he did _something._ He didn’t stand paralyzed with indecision and let Reginald take the reins. Allison can’t say that it was the right choice, but she’s proud of him anyway for giving that asshole what he deserves.

So that’s what she tells him. “At least you did something _._ It’s okay, we just have to figure out what to do next. Make a plan.” 

A plan. Great. They are _so_ _great_ at those.

* * *

Dave’s never woken up like this before. There’s been a lot of firsts, in the past not-even-24-hours. Meeting Klaus and realizing that he could feel this way, just from looking into someone’s eyes - it’s a little stressful, given that Dave has a girlfriend and Klaus isn’t her, or even _a_ her. But it could have been worse. Waking up tied to a chair gives a person some perspective.

He comes to sooner than Klaus does, but that’s no surprise. Klaus took multiple hefty wallops to the head. The blood matting his hair is visible even in this dim room. His head hangs heavy, his chin to his chest. Dave can’t see his face.

He keeps worrying that his neck will be sore from staying in that position. It’s the least of their worries, but it’s the one that Dave keeps coming back to.

He can’t do anything to help, though. His arms are pulled behind him, around the back of his chair. The thin metal has been pressing into his biceps for so long he almost can’t tell where the rung ends and his arm begins. Almost.

“Klaus,” Dave hisses, his best attempt at helping with the neck situation, but Klaus doesn’t move, and Dave refuses to consider that this could be a permanent issue.

Instead, he considers their surroundings. It’s not a very big room, longer than it is wide. The wall behind Klaus has a countertop running below what looks like a large papered over window. The heavy gray door on Dave’s right seems to be the only entrance, although with the way his wrists are held, he can’t really twist around to see much of the space behind himself.

Getting the lay of the land, that seems like the best thing he can be doing in this situation. The situation being one that he doesn’t need to think about in too many specifics. Because, specifically, he is tied in a chair in a musty dark room with a headache and a near stranger, and, presumably, at some soon point, their kidnapper, who of course is a complete and total stranger, and this is all completely and totally insane.

Dave’s breathing is coming from too high in his chest and it makes his arms ache, and his vision is prickling with dark spots on the edges and that’s not just because of how the only light in the room is whatever can bleed through the butcher paper on the window. A noise makes his pounding heart nearly burst, but it’s just Klaus, groaning as he comes to. Somehow, it makes Dave feel a little better, having Klaus here.

It’s terrible, the things Dave is finding comfort in right now. He shouldn’t be happy that someone else is in this awful spot, and the memory of Klaus saying ‘not again’ shouldn’t make him hopeful. But apparently Klaus has experience with this sort of thing, and maybe that means he’ll be able to get them out of it? Maybe Klaus is a spy after all, and whatever side he works for has a team coming in to save him. His friend the other night looked like he belonged on a secret spy team, although, probably not, then. Not particularly incognito. 

Besides, Klaus’ response to consciousness is very much like Dave’s own. When the ropes around his forearms prevent him from moving, his shoulders start hitch with shallow, tight breaths. Dave can’t understand all his muttered words, but he makes out “again” a couple of times, and what sounds like, “That’s easy for you to say.”

So there is Dave’s answer — familiarity doesn’t breed contentment when it comes to this sort of thing. He’s reluctant to put a name to ‘this thing,’ because he would very much like to be wrong.

“Klaus?” It’s almost a whisper. He almost feels like he shouldn’t interrupt, even though that makes no sense. He’s the only other one here. Klaus doesn’t respond, and Dave clears his throat. “Klaus, do you —”

Whatever he’d meant to ask falls out of his head when Klaus snaps his head up, a stricken expression on his face, as if he’s seen a ghost. For several suspended seconds, Dave’s name hangs on Klaus’ lips, formed but unspoken. Then the tension sags out of him and his body hangs wearily, as if this is something Klaus has been through before, or should have expected.

“Klaus, what are we — what is this? I don’t know how to — or what to —” Dave doesn’t know how to finish a sentence, apparently.

Before responding, Klaus scans the corners of the room, the spots where the ceiling and walls meet. Then he nods off to his side, and returns his attention to Dave. “It’s going to be okay, okay?” He’s very earnest about it, but Dave can’t help but notice the apprehensive slant in his posture. Of course Dave can’t blame him for not being entirely at ease when tied up in a dirty dark abandoned place that quite effectively conveys ‘no one is going to find you here.’

He knows it’s not true, he knows it’s a stupid question. He asks it anyway, because he can’t not. “So, is this a prank then? Something to do with some really unfunny friends of yours?” The ‘no’ is all over Klaus’ face, but he hesitates saying it and an edge of hysteria keeps Dave pressing. “And they are going to come and let us go?”

“No,” Klaus says. “He’s not going to do that.”

“You know him?” There’s a band of pressure around Dave’s forehead, and he can’t tell if Klaus’ certainty makes it ease up or twist tighter.

“I know who he works for.”

“The Soviets.” As insane as it sounds, the theory that he’d somehow gotten himself tangled up in a commie spy plot has started to feel much less far-fetched. It’s become the most reasonable explanation, at some point between waking up tied in a chair and Klaus showing up to deliver cryptic warnings.

Suspicious cryptic warnings. How did he forget how suspicious Klaus was being? “No, wait a second, that’s _you_ , isn’t it? I knew it! You’re a Soviet spy, I knew it; why did I decide to help you?”

“What? No.” There’s nothing about this that Dave finds amusing, but apparently that isn’t true for Klaus. Would that be the reaction of a spy losing his cover? But does it matter, in the end? Klaus isn’t the one who tied Dave up.

Still. “Your name is _Klaus.”_

“Nickname.” With a very limited range of movement, Klaus manages to convey an indifferent shrug. “I’d be interested in an answer to that question too, by the by.”

Dave has a comical amount of questions right now, including how to get untied from ropes. He doesn’t know what question Klaus is referring to.

“Why did you decide to help?” Klaus asks. Dave doesn’t know how he does it, but somehow Klaus manages to make it clear that all his attention is fixed on Dave, even when he keeps his gaze on the floor. Really, he should be grateful for that, because when Klaus does meet his eyes, Dave has to make a concentrated effort not to think any un-American thoughts. “It’s just that it seemed a bit like maybe you were about to do the same thing when he came along and stole your thunder.”

“Jesus Christ!” Dave chokes out. There’s a deepening bruise on Klaus’ cheekbone, sneaking below his right eye. There’s angry scrapes along his hairline from where his face met pavement. Blood, shiny and dark, soaks his hair and trails down his neck. Dave could never do that, not to Klaus. Not to anyone _._ “Of course not, no. I think he probably gave you a concussion.”

“Probably, yeah.” He sounds so unconcerned. Which is concerning. “Your classic back alleyway type of parting gift. I haven’t died from one yet.” It’s also concerning when he pauses thoughtfully and adds, “I think.”

“How many have you —” Dave shakes his head. It’s at least over two. “There’s no good answer for that.”

Klaus actually laughs at that, here, in the room where maybe they are both about to die. It’s not much more than a huff of air, but it’s paired with a delighted grin, wide enough that it reopens a split in his bottom lip. Dave winces at that; Klaus could probably do with less blood loss, at the moment.

Purposefully, Klaus bites down on the spot. He closes his eyes and drags his teeth against the wound. When he opens them again, they are already fixed on Dave.

“Dave,” he says. His voice is too gentle for this place. He tries to lean in closer but the restraints hold him back. “I should tell you —”

But he doesn’t. Instead he flinches, and cranes his neck around, looking towards the door.

Dave can’t hear anything, but he knows. It’s clear enough. “He’s coming back, isn’t he.”

Klaus inclines his head, like he’s trying to find the right words, but they aren’t necessary. Dave understands.

Somehow, the worst part of this isn’t the chill of the feverish sweat coating his skin, or the pounding of his pulse thrumming through his aching shoulders. It’s not even the indignity of dying in a shabby basement office space. The worst part is that Klaus is terrified.

That’s clear enough, too, and it’s painful in its own way. The selfish explanation is that Klaus is Dave’s only shot at getting out of here as alive and unscathed as possible, and he’s not exactly inspiring confidence right now. But more than anything, it’s heartbreaking, because no person should ever look like that. Klaus is trembling under its weight, gripped by the terror of a person who knows exactly what’s coming, and is helpless to stop it.

“It’s going to be okay, Dave,” he says. “You’re going to be okay.” And then the lock on the door clicks, and Klaus squeezes his eyes shut, and when they open, Dave half-believes him, because Klaus smiles.

Not a single bit of that fear is visible as the man from the alleyway enters the room. It’s all been replaced by a smug expression that says, ‘I know I’m having more fun than you, and that makes it even more fun.’ With the casual cadence of friends meeting at the bar, Klaus says, “Fancy meeting you here.”

It’s confident enough that Dave second guesses himself. “Wait, you _do_ know him?”

The man sets down his things on the counter: his briefcase and a heavy box of tools that clang together when he moves it. “We’re about to get very well acquainted,” he says.

Dave’s blood runs cold. Klaus smiles.

* * *

_Once in a 1968_

When he first notices, they’re in the back of a rattling truck headed back to the base, crammed in too close to the others for Dave to make a big deal out of it. Klaus rubs absently at the sweat drying on his neck, and when he pulls his hand away, his fingertips are red.

“Oh shit,” he murmurs, surprised. He shouldn’t be, war zones are dirty and bloody and also quite loud. Sure enough, it’s his ear that’s wet. But it’s not like the fresh ghost following him around has gotten any quieter, and he can still hear his fingers snap on that side of his head, so he’s not worried.

Dave is.

He jabs Klaus in the knee a few times, harder than can be explained by the jostling of the truck bed. Klaus shoots him a smile, but it only deepens the concerned furrow carving up Dave’s forehead. “Did you get hit?” he asks.

Klaus shakes his head and wipes his hand on his vest. Dave keeps looking at him, like he’s expecting more. “Just burst my eardrum,” Klaus tells him. “Guns are loud. No big deal.” He smiles more, and Dave frowns more. But he doesn’t say anything more, so chances are good that it’s going to come back up.

It doesn’t take long. When Klaus is able to peel away from the bustle of returning, he goes to splash some water on his face. Once he blinks his eyes clear, Dave is already there.

“Hey there, lover.” He knows it’ll piss Dave off, and Dave already looks pissed, so Klaus might as well. No harm, no foul, all that. Or maybe, no harm when a foul mood is where things start.

But instead of turning pink and hissing at him to quiet down, Dave puts a grubby hand on Klaus’ face. It feels soft, in spite of everything. He turns Klaus’ head to the side. “We should get this looked at.” His touch around Klaus’ ear is as gossamer light as his voice.

“It’s fine. We” —Klaus pulls himself from Dave’s hold— “don’t need to do anything.” Alright, so maybe it’s Klaus who is pissed off already. Turns out fighting in the Vietnam War can make a person a tad cranky. That, or seeing the dead, take your pick. “It’s just a busted eardrum, it’ll fix itself.”

“How do you know that? I’ve never seen this happen to the others.”

“Maybe it’s one of those things that’s more likely the more it’s happened, I don’t know. But I do know it’ll be fine.”

“How many times has it —” Dave finishes whatever mental math he was running and grimaces. “There’s no good answer for that. At least twice before? It’s too many times.”

Klaus doesn’t have an exact count, but it’s been a lot more than twice. Guns are loud, and ghosts are too, and ear infections are easy to get when you don’t have a house to go home to in winter.

Still, no one has bothered to count for him before. It’s kind and it’s touching and it’s also a lot of pressure. Anything about him that a person could want to tally up would be starting off at a pretty high handicap, and his numbers are only ever going to go up. Klaus throws his hands up. “I can’t fix that one for you, Dave.”

“I don’t need you to. I’m just —” Dave bundles up a fistful of hair at the nape of his neck and pulls. It’s what he does when he’s upset. “I don’t like seeing you like that. I don’t want you to get hurt.”

Klaus fishes an a-bomb out of his pocket and lights up, because that’s what _he_ does when he’s upset. “This is a war, baby. I think you might need to get used to some bloodshed.”

“But not _yours.”_

It rips out of him, desperate, like a plea or a prayer, not backed by faith or belief or hope but just from wanting it, so much. Klaus recognizes it quite well. There’s no stronger force on this earth than the fear of wanting. Nothing more destructive, either, especially when it goes unfulfilled.

Klaus clears his throat. “You might have to get used to that, too.” He tries to keep himself from looking at Dave, but he wants to. His blue eyes are misty and red-rimmed, but not from the smoke. Which reminds Klaus to take another drag. That one ghost is beginning to blur away, thank Christ. “You can’t save me, Dave. You can’t protect me in a fucking war zone, especially when I’m high all the time.”

He waves the cigarette in the air as punctuation. It has the desired effect, shoving the conversation into an argument about drugs that neither of them actually care about. Dave gets in a line about how Klaus chases death, which makes Klaus laugh, which makes Dave leave.

“Maybe I wouldn’t have to try so hard, if death would stop chasing me,” he mutters. As if on cue, the ghost finally disappears. He isn’t someone Klaus knew very well; a new arrival who’d only been in country, what, a month? And now he’s dead, and thanks to narcotics, also gone.

Unfortunately, he’s not forgotten. His image will live on in Klaus’ mind for as long as Klaus still has one.

He was a young soldier, with dirty blonde hair cut short on the sides and a mess of curls up on top. He was tall and broad and wearing the same army greens as the rest of the men out here. One key difference was the gaping hole in his cheek. Before it stopped, his heart had pumped out enough blood to completely coat the bottom of his face, making his features hard to distinguish from a distance. When Klaus had first spotted him, he thought his own heart would stop.

That’s the whole problem, really. Klaus can talk a big game, he can condescendingly lecture Dave about how death comes for everyone and how it’s safer not to get too attached, and it’s true. Undeniably, and categorically. But undeniable and categorical truths have never done much to dissuade Klaus from his own bad habits.

If things were reversed, if it were Dave who got hurt? If Dave died? There’s no such thing as getting used to that.

Klaus was once deemed a ‘superhero.’ He and his siblings had once been the subject of an article titled, ‘The Kids Who Can Have It All.’ He should be the most capable person here, he should be able to save at least one damned person.

But that _had_ been an article where the praise Klaus lavished on the Academy was deemed by his father to be unsatisfactorily glowing, and he’d been treated to a little electroshock “therapy” as encouragement to use stronger adjectives in the next interview, so. You can’t believe everything you read.

And he’s in a fucking war zone, and he’s high all the time. He doesn’t have the power to protect Dave, he knows that.

But he wants to.

Klaus knows helplessness. They are intimately acquainted. He’s made money from the feeling plenty of times and even enjoyed it on occasion, but he’s never been as powerless as he is with Dave.

That’s its own problem. He can’t keep Dave pushed away; it’s like the guy has his own gravitational pull, and Klaus is just a lovesick satellite. He makes his apologies, they make up, and with every fight and near miss, his orbit shrinks tighter.

Even though his intention is to keep Dave far away from harm, Klaus draws in closer. It’s a contradiction.

But then, so is all of it. Everything about Klaus, from the way he was born to the way he met the love of his life. It’s all been impossible, so maybe thwarting a paradox here or there isn’t so unlikely. Not that he’s ever been able to pick any of it, but maybe this time. He wants this time to beat the odds. He wants Dave to stay safe.

He wants it so much, more than anything, so he makes fierce promises to himself and he fights against fate, harder than he’s ever fought in his life. And of course, in the end, he loses.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Soooooo there's this little thing called season 2 coming out tomorrow so frankly I will probably be losing every ounce of my goddamned shit about that for a while? I am still planning on continuing this - it's certainly got it's own a life and storyline that's apart from s2 (I _presume???!??!?!_ I'll _find out TOMORROW??!??I)._ But, you know, it's not like I've been the fastest writer before and now, all my shit is guaranteed to be lost for a while.
> 
> You can - and SHOULD - come talk to me on [my tumblr](https://hermitreunited.tumblr.com/) about the show ( _and the second season that we will know everything about!!!?!?!?!?!!!!)_ or also about this fic to check for updates. The only warning is that once I get going you might not be able to stop me talking to you. <3
> 
> Sneak Peek of Chapter Seven:
> 
> He’s so young. Christ, he’s young. Klaus doesn’t think he’s ever been that young. With all that floppy hair and those big blue eyes looking for whoever’s in charge, assuming that they’ll make it all make sense. No, Klaus has never been that young. He wants to promise that Dave won’t have to grow up so fast tonight, but Klaus knows his own promises don’t mean shit. He’ll gladly die for trying, though.


	7. Chapter Seven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Klaus wouldn’t expect anyone to come and rescue him anyway; last time, he was in a motel room with cheap thin walls and nobody had cared about the screaming then.
> 
> The last time wasn’t even a full year ago. Christ, Klaus could use a break. Just a short little sabbatical from these people tying him to chairs and having their way with him. But whatever, it’s fine, it really is — just as long as it’s Klaus who is getting worked over here, and no one else.

So he’s tied to a chair with a Commission agent staring him down. Again. It’s becoming a habit.Klaus doesn’t think mindfulness meditation is going to be much help in kicking this one, though. It’s never really helped him kick anything, if he’s honest. So, you know what, fuck it. If this is going to be his life now, a couple of kidnappings every year, alright fine, bring them on.

Alone, though. He should be here alone. Dave shouldn’t be here. This was never supposed to be part of Dave’s life.

He’s so young. Christ, he’s young. Younger than Klaus himself might have ever been. With all that floppy hair and those big blue eyes looking for whoever’s in charge, assuming that they’ll make it all make sense. No, Klaus has never been that young. He wants to promise that Dave won’t have to grow up so fast tonight, but Klaus knows his own promises don’t mean shit. He’ll gladly die for trying, though.

“Nice digs,” he says. “Nicer than last time. I must be moving up in the world.”

“You? No, this has nothing to do with you.” The agent is kind of a mousy looking guy, with a muted, nasal voice to match. He’s wearing grandpa clothes, a short boxy tie bracketed by suspenders that hoist his loose fitting pants up to his waist. It’d be all too easy for Klaus to completely disregard this guy as a threat, but the aching muscles all across his body serve as a pretty good reminder.

He’s shifting through the tools he brought in with him. Klaus can’t get a good look at what he has, but Ben’s wince is a dead giveaway. Plus they sound heavy and sharp and metallic. So that’s good.

“Well shit, I’m sorry for intruding on you, then. We can get out of here if you want. If you’ve got something in there to cut these ropes, of course.” Klaus puts on a dazzling smile.

The man holds up a pair of garden shears and says amicably, “That’s not what I’m planning on using these for.”

Excellent, great, awesome. Fucking fantastic.

In his periphery, Dave looks like he’s about to cry. Klaus does his best to cheat his periphery more to the left. Seeing that actually isn’t very helpful right now. He’s between a rock and a hard place though, because too far to the left and there’s that briefcase that keeps snatching his attention.

Black, a little worn, heavier than it looks. It’s not the same briefcase, Klaus destroyed that one, but it’s not all that different, either. He’d hoped it was something good, some kind of karmic reward for everything he’d just been through, and then he’d opened it, and it had been karma after all, dropping him into arguably one of the most horrific war zones of the 20th century. Certainly one of the worst places Klaus had ever been, and that’s an impressive bar to clear.

And then he’d thought — maybe ‘reward’ was the right word after all. And then he knew that wasn’t the case either, because a reward implies Klaus had done something to earn it, and frankly, Dave was more than Klaus ever deserved. And then, somehow, that was even _okay._

But the treasure was never the briefcase. The briefcase was just the thing he’d been left with, the thing his hands held onto when he was unmade, dismantled by the most profound pain he has ever experienced in his entire painful life.

It’s not the same briefcase, and it’s not the same treasure. But they’re real fucking close. Too close. And it’s too soon, it was only a few days ago that this all happened and he can’t go through it again, he really can’t. He just can’t.

“You’re in a security office in a parking garage in an entirely empty building.” Shrill metal scrapes against the floor as the man drags over a folding chair and sits in front of Klaus. “It’s in the midst of an ownership transfer that became mired in some complicated legal difficulties. The people I work for have a very far reach.” He says it all very matter-of-factly. “No one will come here. No one will hear you, or find you.”

“He’s telling the truth, Klaus,” Ben says. “It’s completely deserted.”

The truth doesn’t really matter. Klaus wouldn’t expect anyone to come and rescue him anyway; last time, he was in a motel room with cheap thin walls and nobody had cared about the screaming then.

The last time wasn’t even a full year ago. Christ, Klaus could use a break. Just a short little sabbatical from these people tying him to chairs and having their way with him. But whatever, it’s fine, it really is —just as long as it’s Klaus who is getting worked over here, and no one else.

“It’s nice when your company takes care of you, isn’t it?” Klaus says. “Sounds like they’re really dedicated to you — what was your name again? I can’t remember if we got properly introduced, I hit my head and I think some things got shook loose up there.” It’s probably some stupid codename, Slade or Crash or something ridiculous.

“Colin.”

Okay, or that. Why not. “Oh Colin, wow, lovely to meet you. I’m Klaus and this here is Dan.” Klaus inclines his head in Dave’s direction.

Dave speaks up, although quietly, to correct him. “It’s Dave.”

“Right, sorry, _Dave,_ that’s right. We were just getting acquainted when you came in, Colin.” He chances a look over at Dave, and at least confusion is better than blatant panic. He just hopes that Dave will keep his corrections to a minimum after this first one. In an ideal world, Colin forgets that Dave is even here. Klaus doesn’t typically get best case scenarios though, so for now he prattles on. “But it’s like I was saying, it’s very impressive, this setup you’ve got here. The Commission didn’t have to go to so much trouble just for me; I’m flattered.”

“And like I said, this wasn’t for you.” Colin gets up and starts to rifle through his tool box. “I just finished up an actual important job and I was still in the neighborhood.”

Klaus knows that’s true, too. He can see the bloodstains, a now permanent part of the decor, soaked into the concrete behind Dave. He’d watched the ghost of an imaginatively rearranged businessman hightail it out of the room when Colin came in. What kind of complicated legal issues will come up when the new owner of the building discovers all of this, he wonders. None of it matters, though, he’s only worried about making sure Colin takes interest in the right person.

And he does. It’s a clear measure of how fucked up Klaus’ life is that his heart leaps in joy when Colin closes in with a mallet in hand, but sometimes that’s just how it goes. “So you’re familiar with my employers, then.”

“Oh, we go way back,” Klaus says. He doesn’t look at the mallet, he doesn’t look at Ben, he doesn’t look at Dave. “Or, way forward? Depends how you look at it. Time travel, it can get so confusing, am I right?”

There’s a strangled noise of shock from Dave’s direction. Klaus is confident that his barometer for this is going to change quite soon, but holding himself back from looking for Dave’s reaction is the most physically taxing thing he’s done in a while.

“Is time travel something you do a lot of?” Colin asks.

“I dabble. Here and there. You know how it is.”

“I don’t know that I do. Now listen Klaus, I’ve got a lot of questions for you and I need to trust that you’ll be honest with me.”

That’s all the warning he gets before the wooden handle of the mallet jams into his side, like a punch with extra leverage and a point of impact that’s harder and more concentrated than a fist.

The sound Klaus makes is involuntary, but he’s able to tack on a laugh at the end of it. “Don’t you trust me, Colin?”

“I want to, Klaus, I do,” he says in that even-keeled, nasally voice of his. He sounds like he should be telling Klaus about the church bake sale, not torturing him for information. “But I don’t want to spend a whole lot of time on this, you know? So I just want to make sure you know how serious I am about this.”

“Noted,” Klaus says. When he recovers from Colin’s punctuation, he points out, “I’ve got to say, for a guy who is so interested in a speedy interrogation, you sure are taking your time asking a question.”

A flash of irritation cracks Colin’s placid exterior. Ben catches it too, cautioning, “Klaus, you’re pissing him off.” Since that’s exactly what he’s trying to do, Klaus smiles. He’s pretty sure Colin doesn’t like that either.

“Why are you here?”

“When somebody knocks me unconscious, I usually go wherever they take me.” Klaus directs this one towards Dave, like it’s an inside joke, so Klaus can laugh as though he’s laughing with someone.

He’s been careful not to dwell on any of Colin’s ministrations, it’s better to just let that be part of the general ambience of the space. It’s harder not to think about Colin’s hands right now, probing at his torso through his thin shirt, lining up the perfect shot beneath his ribs. It’s another indication of what a freak Klaus is that he prefers being hit with a construction tool to being felt up like this. Especially in present company.

“Why did you come to 1963?”

“I think it was mostly an accident, if I’m honest.”

“Who is he?” Colin tilts his head in Dave’s direction. He has to wait to get his answer though; it takes Klaus a minute to get his breath back.

“What, that guy? Dean? No, right, right, _Dave._ That’s Dave, he’s just some guy.” Klaus looks between the two of them, like he’s trying to piece something together. “As far as I know? You’re the one who tied him to a chair.”

Colin narrows his eyes. “You don’t know him?”

“Know some guy from the 60s? Why would I know some guy from 50 years ago?”

It’s an attention-grabber of an admission. Everybody’s got something to say about that one.

Ben folds his arms and says, “Seriously, Klaus?”

Dave only gets out the beginning of a word that sounds like a dumbstruck, “What?”

Colin stays his hand and muses, “You came from the 2010s then.” He doesn’t say it like a question, he says it like he knows he’s getting somewhere. Which is absolutely fine by Klaus, but Colin doesn’t need to know that.

Klaus hangs his head for a moment, just a few seconds, before launching into an animated spiel. “The thing is, Colin, this whole ‘torture for information’ thing? There’s just nothing you can do that I haven’t already done. I’m not a virgin in any possible sense anymore.”

Undeniably, unless he asks and then Klaus will definitely deny it, Colin does know his stuff. He lands a perfect peroneal strike, sending a numbing shockwave down Klaus’ left leg. It’s kind of a blast from the past (future); Reg taught them all how to do that to each other, thinking that enough practice could cut down on the recovery time it took to be able to walk again.

“I don’t think you are taking this seriously, Klaus.”

“Well, you’ve got me all nostalgic now. Tell me,” Klaus says, “how are Hazel and Cha Cha doing these days? Last time I saw them they didn’t seem to be getting along so well.” In an exaggerated aside directed at Dave, Klaus adds, “Oh, this is awkward, my sister _may_ have killed them both.”

The mistake there is that now Klaus can see Dave’s face, and it looks horrified. Maybe even a little disgusted. Klaus’ already pounding heart flips in his chest. They’ve got bigger problems to fry right now, but there’s a reason that Klaus never brought up all the time travel and superhero stuff to Dave before. Because it’s the sort of conversation that conjures up an expression like that.

There’s not a better place to focus his attention, is the thing, because Colin is scoping out his collarbone, and Klaus really doesn’t want to think about it but this one is going to hurt.

So he fixes his eyes on the bloodstain on the floor and thinks of all the reasons to savor it. He was never honest with Dave about his life, the truth literally had to be tortured out of him. And now Klaus is responsible for this mess, for getting precious little floppy-haired innocent Dave all tangled up with the Commission, and even if Klaus gets him through this physically unscathed - _when_ \- Dave is still going to be traumatized; this isn’t the kind of experience that’s easy to just shrug off. Klaus is selfish and this is his fault, and so when the impact sweeps through his body, it’s exactly what he deserves. He breathes through it, rides the wave, until he can smile.

When the blood stops screaming in his ears and he can hear again, Klaus realizes with a surge of panic that Dave is muttering curses under his breath. But Colin is over at his toolbox again, he hasn’t touched Dave, thank christ.

Klaus gives him what is intended as an encouraging smile, but it makes Dave recoil. That’s fair enough. With the way Klaus’ head is throbbing, it’s probably more of a grimace.

“Klaus,” Ben says, urgency making his voice higher than usual. Klaus blinks blearily at him; he’s not sure if it’s sweat or tears or probably some combination of both, but his vision isn’t super clear right now. Maybe it’s the head trauma. “Klaus, you’ve got to figure something out, like now, okay?”

“Oh, fabulous,” Klaus says, “that must be good news.”

Then he sees Colin’s new tool - a dull awl. Great news, the best news.

He slides a stool alongside the armrest, loosens the rope around Klaus’ wrist a bit. “I can see that you’re a tough nut to crack.”

“Don’t sweat it, man.” It’d be a better performance if Klaus could get his hand to unclench on his own, but Colin has to pry his shaking fist open. “You have a great presence, I can see you making it to the big time if you put in your hours and really work for it. I’m just sort of a professional with this kind of stuff already, so.”

Colin flips over Klaus’ hand and strokes the letters on his palm with a chuckle. GOODBYE. “That’s fitting,” he says.

“Yeah,” Klaus laughs, but that’s a mistake, because once it gets going he can’t really stop. Well, he’s not _laughing,_ not really. He’s hyperventilating. He’d rather not be doing that, he’d rather not be so squirmy when Colin places his palm down on the stool, fingers splayed out flat and trembling. He’d rather not have a few holes punched through his hand, if it comes down to it.

More than all of that, he’d rather Dave wasn’t here. He’s just a kid, he shouldn’t have to know what this sounds like. But Klaus had to go and bring him into this. At least maybe this will be the way to save him - maybe Dave will know better than to sign up for a war after watching Klaus be torn into pieces across the room from him. There are certainly worse causes to die for.There’s less in death to look forward to, now that he’s made sure that the Dave who Klaus met in 1968 can never possibly exist, but. At least there’s the not being alive part.

Colin’s not going to give that to him easily, though. He’s adjusting his placement, jamming the point of the metal rod between Klaus thumb and forefinger, over and over, up and down the length of those fragile bones. Klaus doesn’t usually think of them as being fragile, but, well. They are about to be snapped into pieces, what’s more fragile than that?

He finds what he’s looking for when he hits a nerve and Klaus hisses in pain. “There we go,” Colin says. “Right there.”

“Congratulations,” Klaus grits out. Dave and Ben are making some kind of racket, but it’s hard to discern, it’s very abstract. Reality is the place where cold metal meets skin, and anything else is too far away to comprehend.

Colin lines up his aim, but pauses with his mallet held high. “Just so we’re clear, I’m expecting you to tell me who you work for after this.”

“Nobody! It’s nobody, I’m a terrible employee,” Klaus insists.

He didn’t expect his smart aleck comment to make a difference, Klaus’ bullshit doesn’t typically matter a whole lot, and his truth matters even less, but Colin snaps his fingers and gets up. Dave says, “Oh thank goodness,” but in Klaus’ experience, it’s too early for gratitude.

And he’s right, of course. His experience has been lifelong, and he’s a quick learner. It’d be real neat to be right about something that isn’t how much his torture is going to hurt, but. At least he has a specialty. His powers certainly don’t do him enough good to count.

Colin comes back with a thick leather strap. “Don’t want you biting off your own tongue when I’ve still got questions for you.” He says it with the cheery pragmatism of a 50s sitcom dad explaining that ‘broccoli might be a chore to eat but they keep your bones strong.'

Or so Klaus assumes. His own father was less sitcom, more leather strap. Klaus’ preferred method for dealing with him had always been to bare his teeth and bear it. But he doesn’t actually want to break said teeth, or bite his tongue off, certainly not in front of young Dave, who is already green and sweating just from the suggestion.

Colin lightly taps the underside of Klaus’ mulishly set chin, making Klaus tilt his head up and look at him. “I won’t make you, of course. It’s your choice. But this really is going to hurt.”

Which is a masterstroke, really it is. Of _course_ his torturer would _never_ make Klaus do something he doesn’t want to do, the very idea is so uncivilized. That sounds a lot more like dear old dad! But without a tongue he can’t explain the joke. Every stubborn inch of him rebels against it, but slowly, slowly, he is able to force his jaw to unlock.

Colin wedges the leather between Klaus’ teeth and pats his cheek. “That’s a good boy.”

Somehow, this blow is the hardest hitting yet. The whole setup is too familiar, and too in front of Dave. It lights a hot pit of shame in his stomach, just below another hard hitting blow from earlier, the one that’s still making deep breaths a little more stabby than is usually considered ideal.

“Now where were we?” Colin says.

Whatever. Stabby deep breaths are not a big deal. He’s not breathing all that deeply.

“You can’t do this, this is insane, this can’t actually happen,” says Dave.

It’s hard to say with any confidence that he’s breathing at all. Taking in oxygen is a core component of breathing and it doesn’t feel like that’s a part of whatever it is Klaus is doing.

“Just let me know whenever you’re ready to stop.” Colin tells him.

Dave keeps saying more of the same empty disbelieving phrases. It harmonizes with Ben’s pleading, things like, “Come on Klaus, you’ve got to just do something, for fuck’s sake.” Shockingly, the buzzing panic ratcheting up in the background isn’t actually helping him all that much.

But then Colin says, “Actually, maybe you’re right. Maybe you are too tough for me,” and then he turns to look at Dave and says, “But I bet _he’s_ not,” and then Klaus is _definitely_ not breathing anymore.

And Colin can tell. Fuck. He can tell and he smiles and moves next to Dave, who has gone statue still in his chair, his big blue young wide eyes staring at Klaus, desperate for a salvation that Klaus wants to give him, had tried to give him, but screwed up. He wouldn’t even be looking for it if Klaus hadn’t screwed up and got him pulled into all of this in the first place.

He’s so young and so good and so scared and he doesn’t deserve any of this, he doesn’t deserve any of the things that Klaus has brought into his life.

Colin rakes an evaluating gaze over Dave’s taut form. It doesn’t matter if his eyes caressing Dave is a metaphorical rather than literal touch, it’s already more contact than Klaus can accept.

Not that he can do anything about it, of course. He thrashes against his bonds but it doesn’t do any good. It’s actually the worst thing he could do right now, he’s just confirming that Colin has got it right. This is the turning point, this is the fatal mistake that destroys things forever, but Klaus can’t help it, he can’t help any of it, he tried and look where it got them.

“I have no idea what’s going on here, I can’t help you,” Dave tells Colin, his voice polite and small. That’s this little Dave, polite and small and scared, and it’s Klaus’ fucking fault.

“I think I believe you,” Colin says, “but clearly this is going to have an effect on him.” He tilts his head in Klaus’ direction, and raises his mallet. “It’s nothing personal.”

Time moves differently. It’s overflowing. It means that Klaus can drink in every agonizing shift in Dave’s expression as he realizes. Realizes that no help is coming, that he can’t depend on Klaus, that it doesn’t matter that he’s in a room with other people, because he’s entirely on his own to deal with what comes next. He’s just a kid. Or he used to be.

Dave presses his eyes closed. A tear slips down his cheek.

And that. Is. It. _Everything_ moves differently.

Klaus’ vision pulses, like there’s a strobe light inside of him, filling up his eyes and pounding through his veins, an alternating current of exhilaration and exhaustion, neither one lasting more than a second. Once he recognizes the sensation, he’s able to nudge the contrast down a bit, just in time to see Ben knock Colin’s fucking lights out.

It’s a gratifying image, but there’s more important things to see. No blood, no bruising. Dave is freaked out, but unharmed. That’s going to have to be enough. He’d prefer a little more relief, given that they did just take out the bad guy before he could lay a finger on Dave — but perhaps the part where it’s a ghost who did the saving could be causing some alarm. That’s reasonable.

Christ, but Klaus has got a lot of explaining to do. One long difficult conversation on top of another. He can’t talk with this thing in his mouth though, so that’s something to be grateful for, anyway. It gives him a little break. That Colin, what a pal.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See?? He's _fine!!_ It's all fine.
> 
> Thanks to sunriseseance for coming up with a good not-scary agent name - Colin was the perfect choice. AND eta thanks to anglophile-rin for letting me know that Baby Dave has floppy hair. It's a fact. And thanks to everyone who put up with me complaining about how loooooong this was taking me and letting me torture them with snippets. You can come ask for snippets on [my tumblr](https://hermitreunited.tumblr.com/) if you want, I'm always happy to share!
> 
> Sneak Peek for Chapter Eight:
> 
> This is ridiculous, surely Diego knows that. 
> 
> “Still not hearing a plan, old man.”
> 
> It turns out that it’s Five who is the idiot here, for spending a second thinking that Diego could even define the word ‘ridiculous.’ Diego is the living embodiment of the concept, all wrapped up in his bespoke leather onesie, and he has absolutely no goddamn clue.


	8. Chapter Eight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “So when are we getting rid of the others?” Diego asks.  
> So much for using this time wisely. He puts the brochure back down on the table. He didn’t even open it. “Come again?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter isn't entirely chronological - there is some overlap between the scenes. But I think the context makes it pretty clear where they stand in relation to each other.

No one is here yet. He shouldn’t be surprised — the surprise would be if his idiot siblings managed to complete a simple task and show up on time. Five would even take close to ‘on time.’ He can’t be a stickler down to the minute, because Diego had insisted on getting food before they came over here, and they’re a little late themselves. So Five’s not complaining about the others not being on time, then, he’s complaining about being the first one here at a quarter past.

“Don’t you ever get tired?” Diego’s leaning up against the wall, playing with his knives. This posture and the falsetto pitch to his voice is exceedingly familiar; it’s the same stance he used to take when they were kids and he was, for some irrational reason, feeling superior. Some things never change.

Five narrows his eyes. “Of waiting around for you imbeciles to get your sideshow act together? It does get old, I’ll admit. I thought that the apocalypse had a quick shelf life but you assholes might have it beat.”

“I meant,” Diego says, “tired of being so pissed off all the time.”

“You’re asking _me_ that question?” Five scoffs and turns away. There’s no reason to keep paying attention to this poor excuse for a conversation. He’s got a couple of more pressing concerns right now, such as preventing the fiery end of all life on the planet, for instance.

“You keep pacing around like that, burning up all those calories you barely remember to eat, and you’re going to stunt your growth. And all that caffeine?” He whistles. “You might never grow any taller, pint-size.”

Five might not be tall, but at least he’s not lacking perspective. “This might be a big joke to you, but this isn’t some game. There are consequences — apocalyptic consequences — to screwing up the timeline.”

Diego nods a few times, but Five knows better than to believe that he’s actually in agreement. It’d be nice if even a single one of his six other siblings could extricate their head from their ass and give a shit about this. They can get back to burying themselves in their own asinine personal problems after doomsday has been averted. He’s certain that all their issues will still be waiting for them.

In the meanwhile, Five might as well make use of this time, because unlike the rest of them, he can respect that they don’t have any of it to waste. He picked up a couple of guides from the chamber of commerce as soon as it opened this morning and hasn’t had the chance to go through them yet. He needs to pick times and places to blink in and grab some cash; it’s much easier to just have money on hand than try to talk his way into places, especially with his unfortunate new physique.

“So when are we getting rid of the others?” Diego asks.

So much for using this time wisely. He puts the brochure back down on the table. He didn’t even open it. “Come again?”

“When do we kill everyone? And then me too, of course.” Diego says all of this casually, like this is a given, like it’s something they’ve discussed.

In what he considers a display of remarkable restraint, Five doesn’t shout when he snarls, “What the hell are you talking about, Diego?”

“Well,” Diego paces his words to match his unhurried gait as he saunters across the room to the blackboard. Five’s slapdash diagram is still sketched there. “Right now we’re in the invection point, right?”

“Inflection point.”

“Whatever.” Diego shrugs. “You said that the only way that this closes is if everyone who traveled here leaves or dies, and you aren’t bringing us with you back to 2019. You tell me what options that gives us.”

“I’m not — ” This is ridiculous, surely Diego knows that. “We’re not killing anyone. No one in our family is going to die.”

“Still not hearing a plan, old man.”

It turns out that it’s Five who is the idiot here, for spending a second thinking that Diego could even define the word ‘ridiculous.’ Diego is the living embodiment of the concept, all wrapped up in his bespoke leather onesie, and he has absolutely no goddamn clue.

“I didn’t bring you all back here just to kill you. That doesn’t make any sense.”

“You’ve got spares.”

Spares.

“When you get to 2019, you’ll have a new set of us.”

 _Spares_.

Five sputters. “That’s not how any of this works. Time changes everything, even just a few days, even you idiots. You can’t just be swapped out for another person that looks like you. It’s not the same.”

“So why _did_ you bring us back, Five?” Diego steps in close and Five silently curses the shoddy math that put him back in this short little body. It is absolutely only on a physical level that Five looks up to Number Two. His response doesn’t come quickly enough for Diego, who continues, “I think I know why.”

“And what’s that, Diego? Care to enlighten me?” He says it with an aggressively fake interest, a tone that usually makes people back away. Those people are smarter than his brother, apparently.

Like it’s a crowning achievement, Diego announces, “You made a mistake. Your plan works a lot better without us here.”

And that’s it. That’s his entire point. He’s trying but failing to keep a smirk off his face. Unfortunately for Diego, Five’s all out of ‘good job’ stickers. Besides which, ‘Five makes mistakes’ is not much of a deduction when delivered to a Five who looks thirteen years old. Holy puberty, dime store Batman! Five is well aware that he can make mistakes. He’s made an awful lot.

Not to mention, declaring ‘my presence makes everything worse,’ isn’t really the indictment of _Five_ that Diego seems to think it is. “You’ve got that right, Diego,” Five says. “You being here definitely doesn’t make anything better.”

“You could have come back on your own and handled this 60s shit by yourself. You _should_ have. But you didn’t.”

Pointedly, Five turns to check the time on the clock hanging above the door. This turns out to have been an excellent choice when Diego says, “You could have left us all to burn to a crisp on that stage, but you took us with you instead.”

For a moment, Five can smell it. The scent of the scalding air the day he arrived. It makes him want to pull his sweater up over his nose to protect his lungs. He hates coughing up that black ash, because he knows what it’s made of. There were bodies, lots of them, but as horrible as it was, Five knows there weren’t quite _enough_.

But that’s just for a moment. The dust in this air is just your average spare room dust. It’s fine.

“Your point?” he snaps.

Diego leans in and speaks softly, and even though there isn’t anyone around to overhear them, Five finds himself appreciating it anyway. “You might like to bitch and moan about how useless we all are, but the truth is that you’ve got a gooey marshmallow center, just like those horrible sandwiches you like to eat.” He raises his voice as he drags a folding chair from the front row over to the table. “You like us. Even if we make your life harder.”

“If,” Five scoffs, but his heart isn’t in it. “Try when.”

“If, when, whatever,” Diego tilts his chair onto its back legs and props his feet up with a smug smile. “I’m still right.”

It’s half past, and the two of them are still the only ones here. It’s definitely a ‘when.’

“You’re my family, Diego.” His voice cracks, because it’s a little kid’s voice, and that’s what kids do. “I’ve already failed you all once. I’m not going to lose anyone again.” He’s seen what that looks like, and it’s simply not an option. His physical body being significantly younger than the others is a bit of a problem, but he’ll figure it out when this apocalypse stuff is all over. He will. Five won’t see anyone in his family as a corpse, not again.

He adjusts his collar and clears his throat in a way that is supposed to signify that this topic of conversation has been closed.

Naturally, Diego doesn’t take the hint. “Well, if you’re sure that the spares don’t count…”

Why is he pushing for this? For his own death? “There are no ‘spares.’”

“Okay then. No spares.” He puts his palms up as if in surrender. “But it sounds like you’ve got a little flaw in your plan to drop us off somewhere and hightail it to a new dimension.”

It hasn’t escaped Five’s notice, but he’d been doing his best not to think about it. Clearly, Diego has no such compunctions.

“You’ll be losing us when you go to this new 2019.”

There it is. Diego is, regrettably, making a good point. He’ll do all he can to find them somewhere safe to be, but once Five jumps to the future, he won’t ever be able to know for sure that they are okay. He’ll never be able to see them again. To save the world, he’ll lose this family that he only just got to know again.

He’s going to miss them. They’re idiots, but he’s grown attached.

It’s distracting, to think about too much. Five clears his throat again and says, “Well, when you’re the one responsible for stopping the apocalypse, sometimes you just can’t have everything you want.”

Diego sits up straight, setting the chair legs and his feet back on the carpeted floor. “Maybe you don’t have to be the only one. We might be able to help, you know. If you’d let us.” He waits, until he catches Five’s eye. Five didn’t realize Diego was even capable of this level of sincerity. He can’t sustain it for very long; he looks away and adds, “We can reach the top shelf without needing a ladder, for one. Most of us, anyway.”

Even though Five can’t see how that would possibly be a viable option, it’s a nice idea. It’s touching, how much Diego is trying. “Thanks, Diego,” Five says, sincere as well. But that can’t be allowed to linger, so he shoots another glare at the clock. “Where the fuck is everyone?”

So of course, this is the moment that someone walks through the wall. He’s blue and glowing and —

“Ben?” Diego breathes, lowering his knives.

“You’re here, thank god,” Ben says. “Come on, you’ve got to come with me right now.”

* * *

No one else is here yet. Luther thought at least Five would be punctual, but maybe he shouldn’t be surprised. If you aren’t stuck moving through time in just the one direction, maybe it’s hard to get worked up about falling behind by an hour here or there.

Because it is closer to ten than nine at this point and — oh. Maybe Luther’s the one that’s late. It’s not like he doesn’t have a good reason for it, though.

There’s a collection of pamphlets scattered across the table at the front of the room, so it looks like someone has been here already. Hopefully one of them, or the team is about to lose their base of operations. But then, they’ve sort of got access to a new one now.

Being in a different century is jarring. It’s nice to have the familiarity of home to return to. It might even be nice to know that Dad is tied up in the basement. Luther isn’t sure how to feel about that yet, but it’s at least possible that he might feel fine about it.

He’ll feel best when he’s back there. It’s not that he doesn’t trust the girls to handle it, they are capable and strong. Vanya is strong enough to blow up the moon, for goodness sake. Still. It’s _Dad_ they’re keeping watch over, and Luther is just waiting around in this empty choir room for his extremely unreliable siblings, like a big hulking idiot.

He shouldn’t complain. He’s the best suited for this job, after all; being alone and waiting are what he’s done for his entire adult life. “I trained for this,” he says. He’s the only one to laugh at his joke, because he’s the only one here.

He really did punch Dad. No hesitation, just swung. Luther thinks he actually kind of liked it.

That’s not a good thing. Luther is pretty sure that’s not a good thing, to enjoy punching someone. Of course he’s not pretending like he’s above physical violence; that’s basically the only thing he’s good for. He was born and bred and remade for it. The sole purpose of Luther’s existence is to be as efficient as possible at doling out physical violence.

But he’s never been meant to like it.

Violence is only the answer when it’s for the right reasons, against the right people. If you start to have fun with it, then you might become one of those bad people yourself. That’s the code of conduct that Luther knows, the central tenet at the core of his childhood, drilled into him as soon as he was able to grasp the meaning of violence. Probably at a younger age than most kids.

That brings him back to the beginning again. The person who taught him all of this was his father, so can he trust any of it? It still feels right and true when Luther turns it over in his mind, but his mind has never been his most valuable asset, and besides, it was built by Dad, too.

It felt good. It felt like the good and right thing to do, but that’s not enough. He’s got to question that, he’s got to question everything. He hasn’t done enough of that in any of his previous 29 years. There’s an apocalypse to prove it.

Luther has a lot to think about, a lot he doesn’t want to think about, and waiting around in an empty room doesn’t make avoiding all of that any easier.

“I thought you’d trained for this.” No one laughs at his joke this time.

He shuffles through the brochures. They’re all for nearby high-end businesses — that doesn’t seem like Diego or Five’s scene. Did Klaus head out on his own just to do some robbery? Put an extravagant shopping spree on a tab and then disappear to the future?

That’s actually pretty smart. He’d probably get away with that one.

Which is not how a hero should think. Luther should warn the businesses, ideally, if he had time, he shouldn’t be thinking well of any kind of stealing, no matter how clever the scheme. But that’s just another round of ‘What Would Dad Do?’ Or rather, ‘What Would Dad Send Number One To Do?’

How did Dad know he was Number One? There’s more than 20 years until Luther is even born. Somehow, Dad knows him. The house is unfinished, but there are rooms that are the same. Pogo isn’t around, but there is still a driver to take Luther where he needs to go. Of course, this time Luther decided where that was, not Reginald. So many things that are so close, but so different.

This driver is a spindly creature, a hunchbacked and top-heavy early robotics project. Clearly a distant ancestor to Grace. It drove Luther here perfectly capably, but once Reginald makes an updated model, it’ll be in the scrap heap.

It’s a gorgeous place, the moon. The furthest thing from a dump. Unless a dump is exactly what Dad was using it for.

He would really like it if the others would show up. He knows he’s late, but surely it’s not _too_ late.

It is pretty late.

He scribbles a note on the blackboard, having to erase and start again a few times. Besides the part where the stick of chalk is very skinny and breakable in his oversized hands, it’s hard to draft a note that communicates, ‘Don’t freak out, but we screwed up big time and Dad is tied up in the basement garage at the Academy, so please come help.’ Or, it’s hard if you don’t just write that, anyway.

By the time Luther figures he’s about done with the phrasing, there is finally someone at the door.

* * *

Dave’s immediate assumption is that he’s hallucinating — from the pain, or the fear, or, actually? The explanation isn’t that important. The fact of the matter is that what he thinks he’s seeing is, to put it bluntly, insane.

But the hallucination doesn’t end. Colin is on the ground, unmoving. The man who put him there, the man who absolutely wasn’t here a moment ago, is blue at the edges. He unties Dave’s hands, and that’s when it’s clear that somehow, impossibly, this is all really happening. It’s the ache of his arms being freed that cinches it. Dave would not have imagined that release would _hurt_ like this.

“We aren’t far from the church; I’m going to try and find the others before this wears off, okay?”

Klaus nods dazedly.

“Keep it going, Klaus, just a little longer,” the man says. He lays his palm flat on the door before yanking it open, leaving the room nearly as suddenly as he had arrived.

“What the fuck,” says Dave. And just to be sure his meaning is appropriately conveyed, “What in the fuck.”

He massages his biceps and realizes that he has a killer headache. It either came on fast, or it wasn’t important enough for his brain to notice it before, because a guy with a hammer was about to torture him. Less than five minutes ago, that had happened. He was almost tortured by a guy with a hammer just now. “What the _fuck.”_

Klaus doesn’t respond. Because he _can’t,_ he’s got that thing in his mouth. Dave lurches out of his chair, skirting away from Colin’s motionless form, and kneels at Klaus’ side.

There’s another reason that Klaus didn’t say anything. His frantic breathing is uneven, like he’s pulling in air at double the rate that he’s letting it out. His entire body is trembling, but his hand is the worst of it. It’s shaking even more violently than it had been when it was actively being threatened, and it hasn’t moved from where Colin positioned it on the stool.

“Hey, hey, shh,” Dave murmurs. It’s the same tone he used years ago, on an injured barn cat at his uncle’s farm, coaxing her into lowering her hackles and accepting help. It brings Klaus back into himself, his awareness pulling back from whatever caught his attention a thousand yards away. He blinks when he finally sees Dave’s face.

“Let me help you, okay?” Gently, so gently, he touches his fingers to Klaus’ face. He stiffens even at that gossamer light contact, so Dave backs off. When Klaus’ shoulders relax back down, he asks, “Can I?”

It’s hard to tell when his entire body is quaking, but he’s fairly certain that Klaus nods. When Dave reaches out the second time, Klaus holds himself very still.

If getting this thing out were easy, surely Klaus would have spat it out by now. Sure enough, it’s just a bit too thick, and Dave ‘helping’ is going to mean prying Klaus’ jaw to open wider than it’s supposed to go. As much as he wants to handle Klaus delicately, a soft touch isn’t going to be enough to help him now.

“This might —” Dave can’t actually say, ‘this might hurt’ to the guy that just got tortured. “I’m sorry.” It’s not much better, but he means it, in a lot of ways. More genuinely than Klaus seems to take it, tossing his head to the side in an approximation of a shrug.

“Okay, okay,” Dave mutters. He wills himself not to be sick as he sets his fingertips on Klaus’ jaw. It’s impossible to not think of the hands that did this just minutes before, what their purpose was. How pain isn’t Dave’s intention, but that’s what will come from his actions anyway. Then he realizes that surely he’s not the only one noticing the parallels, and this isn’t a moment that Klaus needs to have drawn out any longer.

So. “Here we go.” Dave swallows. Watches Klaus’ adam’s apple dip. Tightens his grip. Pulls.

There’s no way it takes as long as it feels to work the leather free. Dave throws it to the ground, eager to put it at a distance. He reaches up, to brush sweaty hair back from Klaus’ forehead, but Klaus goes tense again, and Dave retreats. He starts untying the restraints instead.

“Thank you,” Klaus rasps. His airy voice is scraped as raw as the skin on his wrists. Dave doesn’t remember him shouting, but Dave had stopped noticing anything besides the mallet in Colin’s hand once Dave became its target.

“You don’t need to be thanking me for anything.”

Especially not now — Dave is suddenly completely useless. His hand shake uncontrollably and his knees can’t keep him up. Luckily, he loosened the rope enough that Klaus can pull his hand through and get to work on the other wrist himself.

With a dry laugh, Klaus says, “I really do.”

It is unfathomable how he can be laughing; Klaus is much too casual for the present moment. More casual than Dave is, certainly, but then, this is the first time Dave has ever been in a situation like this. Klaus had told Colin that this was all old hat for him, and based on how he’s acting right now, there’s no reason to think that was a lie. That wasn’t the only thing he’d said, though.

_‘Why would I know some guy from 50 years ago?’_

Both Colin and Klaus had talked like it was rational — like Klaus arrived by way of 2013 and not the interstate. It’s easier to believe than Dave would like. Wasn’t the date the first thing Klaus had asked about, down to the year? That’s a question that normal people don’t need to ask, but a pretty common one for time travelers in sci-fi novels.

So, okay. Time travel. Dave can probably accept that, for now — but the best evidence for it is the part that spooks him the most. Dave doesn’t know Klaus, not really, but somehow, Klaus knows him. Or at least, Dave represents something important to him; Colin was right about that.

The latch of the door clicks, and Dave suddenly remembers about Colin, and how there is nothing stopping him from getting up off the floor and back to his grisly work, because Dave was too busy having a breakdown when he should have been getting them the hell out of this place.

But Colin is still on the ground as three people enter the room. The one who had appeared out of thin air and freed Dave not long ago, the man from that first night in the bar with Klaus, and a kid in a fancy school uniform.

The boy steps to the front of the little group and surveys the room. Luckily, things didn’t get far enough for it to be gory in here, but still. Dave doesn’t think this is any place for a child.

Then that child says, “Son of a bitch,” and Dave just gives up. The guy decked out in leather and weapons — Diego — he’s starting to seem like the most normal one of the bunch. It’s time for Dave to just give up on having expectations about anyone connected with Klaus.

At least their arrival means that this is done. It’s over. Colin won’t be able to overtake all of them, Diego has knives. Strange as they might be, at least Klaus has people here for him.

Although Diego’s method of checking on Klaus is light on bedside manner. He strides over to where Klaus sits and grabs his head to check out his wounds. He’s not being rough, but he’s not being particularly gentle, either. It makes Klaus wince, but he doesn’t protest.

“Are you okay?” Diego asks him.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine.” Klaus waves him off. “I’m aces.” Diego takes him at his word, but Dave can’t help but notice that Klaus hasn’t gotten up from the chair yet.

“Ben, if you’re still” — Diego flutters his fingers — “help me with this guy?”

The gesture is incomprehensible to Dave, but the other man, Ben, nods. He’s wearing all black, too. Even so, Dave doesn’t get the sense that these guys are some kind of special commando squad. Sure, that’s what elite spy forces would want him to think, but still. They just don’t seem particularly elite. With some fumbling, the two of them haul Colin into the chair Dave had been all too happy to vacate.

It feels like a sign. A symbolic moment. Klaus has people here now who are actually useful, and Dave’s spot has been filled.

That’s for the best, it really is. He’s probably already late for his shift at the machine shop; Ralph’ll be pissed. And he’s got a lot of explaining to do for leaving early from the bar. Apologizing, anyway — this doesn’t seem like something Dave can actually _explain._ He runs his hand through his hair, a nervous habit when he’s got a lot on his mind. He probably wouldn’t notice he was even doing it, except it pulls at the tender spot where Colin hit him, and ‘seeing the doctor’ gets added to his to-do list.

He’s got plenty to be getting to, and his part in whatever this was seems to be over, so he should get going.

“Would you look at that.” The kid is sifting through the tool box. “Quite the impressive collection.”

Diego tightens the knot around Colin’s wrist. “Perfect. I’m looking forward to hearing what he has to say.”

Ben is on the man’s other side, but he’s not much help anymore because of the way his hand sinks through the rope, the chair, Colin’s flesh, all of it. Like Ben’s body is a trick of the light, not really there. “Sorry, guys,” he says, and demonstrates the problem by waving his arm through Colin’s chest.

Yeah, Dave should probably head out.

Klaus hasn’t gotten up yet.

He’s very still, his eyes closed, his breathing steady and deliberate and quiet. He’s not asleep, his grip on the armrests is too white-knuckled for that, but it still feels wrong to disturb him. Why force him to open his eyes to the nightmare that is their waking life?

But it also doesn’t feel right to just leave without saying anything. Dave doesn’t know if there is any official etiquette for torture buddies, or an appropriate way to say goodbye to a time traveler that you almost certainly cross paths with again in the future.

“Hey,” he says, eloquently. That’ll really thread that needle.

But Klaus says, “Hey,” back, and he doesn’t seem bothered by it. He seems remarkably unbothered, in fact. Tired, yes, and worn down, undoubtedly, but not much different from the night he first came into the bar — was that really just yesterday? Klaus’ smile is genuine; it could be enough to outshine the bruises, if Dave hadn’t watched him get each one of them.

“So.” Dave really doesn’t want to ask if Klaus is okay, because he _did_ watch him get all those bruises, but that’s still the thing Dave wants to know. He jerks his head at the others and says instead, “So these guys, they are okay?”

“Depends how you define that,” Klaus drawls. “None of them have a healthy relationship with their father. There’s some deep-seated superiority complexes at play, and the opposite of that, too. Yeah, they’re a mess. But it runs in the family.” Dave’s confusion must show on his face because Klaus chuckles and explains, “They’re my brothers.”

Dave doesn’t need to be concerned for Klaus’ safety with them, then. That’s good. Particularly since Diego’s got a hold of the gardening shears and seems to be attempting to sharpen them. “They seem like they’ve got things under control.”

“Don’t let their appearance of competence fool you,” Klaus mumbles, his eyes slipping closed. After everything he’s been through in this past endless hour, he deserves to get some rest. There’s no faulting him for crashing now that the crisis is over.

Awkwardly, Dave shifts on his feet, but there’s nothing left to keep him here. “Well, I guess I should get going then.” He wouldn’t have thought a few minutes ago that he’d be hesitating before leaving this awful room, but then, Klaus hasn’t even moved out of his chair. “You’re sure you’re okay?”

Dave really didn’t mean to say that.

“Oh, yeah, totally.” Klaus’ eyes fly open again. “It’s fine, I’m fine, absolutely. Don’t even worry about it.”

Dave _is_ worried about it, though. A little bit. He can’t help it. But he says, “Okay,” and turns to leave.

“Hey, Dave?” The hoarse quality of Klaus’ voice is more pronounced the louder he speaks, and for some reason it makes Dave feel guilty. “Think about what I said, before all of this. Please?”

“I will.” He’s at war with his instincts, once again, because for some inexplicable reason, the thing he wants most to say is, ‘thanks.’ He definitely should not say that. “I guess I’ll see you around.”

Wryly, Klaus says, “Not if you’re lucky.” He’s smiling, and joking, and still hasn’t moved from that chair, but his brothers are here for him and Dave is leaving.

He’s not sure if he agrees with how Klaus is defining ‘good’ luck. He plays along anyway. “I’ve never been very lucky.” Despite everything, turning to the door feels like supporting evidence.

With a flash of light, the kid appears in front of him, out of thin air. Because apparently that’s a trait that runs in Klaus’ family.

“You’re more right than you know,” he says, somehow both too casual and too intense. “You can’t leave. Not if you want to live.” He stuffs his hands in his pockets. “Scratch that, you can’t leave. No matter what you want.”

Then he ambles away, leaving the exit clear. He’s just trusting that his say-so is enough reason for Dave to stay put. It’s a lot of confident authority to be wielded by a teenager.

“Five, come on,” Klaus protests.

The kid stabs a finger at Colin’s briefcase and snaps, “This is the Commission, Klaus. They don’t screw around.”

Klaus raises his eyebrows and mutters, “Oh, is that right?”

True, the kid — is he actually _named_ Five? — didn’t see it all happen, but even so. It’s pretty obvious what’s been going on here, and why Klaus doesn’t need a lecture on the dangers of this organization.

“They aren’t going to stop coming after him. He’s involved in this now.” The accusatory finger has moved from the briefcase to him. He’s talking about Dave.

“No,” Dave says, “no, I’m not.”

“Sorry, but you are.” Five doesn’t say it harshly, but it’s not a real apology. He’s stating a fact.

“He’s just a bartender, Five,” Diego says.

Five narrows his eyes and whirls on his older brother, somehow menacing despite his size. “So you’ve met him, too. Interesting.”

Is it, though? Dave is pretty sure he doesn’t want to be interesting in this case. “I’ve only seen Klaus a few times,” he puts in. He shouldn’t have, speaking up is like painting a target on himself.

But Five doesn’t direct his question at Dave. “More than once, huh?”

Quietly, Klaus says, “I didn’t break your rules.”

Five hardly lets him finish. “The multiple times that I went over all of this — did you even listen to a word I said? I’m trying to decide if you didn’t know that you were being stupid and selfish, or if you _did_ know and you just didn’t care.”

“Why does it matter,” Klaus says, “when the end result is the same either way.”

“That ‘end result’ is the lives of our family. And this guy, now. They are never going to stop coming after him now that you’ve dragged him into their sights.”

Five is talking about Dave; Dave wishes he would stop doing that. Beyond the fact that what he’s saying is all very ominous, it’s also clearly impacting Klaus. With his face downcast and muscle in his jaw twitching, he looks more upset about this unnecessary scolding than he did during literal torture. Dave wants to tell the kid to be quiet, but Five is way scarier than any kid should be.

“Damn it Klaus, they could have killed you.”

Dave gets the distinct impression that he’s not going to like Klaus’ response to that, but he doesn’t get the chance to find out. Across the room, Ben disappears in a haze of blue and Dave blurts, “How does that keep happening?”

He’s not actually expecting a clear answer, because he hasn’t gotten one yet, for anything. The others look to Klaus as well, but he shrugs and shakes his head. His brothers accept this ‘I don’t know’ as explanation enough, and that’s that.

He’s supposed to be letting this go. No more expectations. He’s giving up on figuring things out. Any minute now.

“What are we doing with him?” Diego jerks his head to the still unconscious Colin.

Dave hopes he has a scorcher of a headache when he wakes up. Fair’s fair. He feels a little guilty for wishing pain on someone, except this guy actively caused plenty of pain, on purpose. Dave’s conscience can take a break for a bit.

Five says, “We can’t let him report back. We find out what he knows, and then we have to kill him.”

Dave’s conscience can’t take _that_ much of a break. But Diego just nods like he anticipated this would be the answer.

“There’s more than one way to find out what he knows,” he says, and reaches for the briefcase.

Klaus and Five burst into motion. Or rather, Klaus moves, lurching up to his feet, and Five just stops being in the middle of the room and is suddenly between Diego and the counter instead. At nearly the same time, Five says, “Diego, do not touch that,” and Klaus says, “It’s a time machine,” as he slumps back into his seat.

It’s a sign of how much crazy shit Dave has been listening to that his biggest reaction is ‘thought a time machine would be bigger.’

“It’s a what?” Diego says, seemingly more taken aback by this information than Dave. An odd reaction, given how it’s obvious now that Diego comes from the future, too. With a shiver that feels worryingly like excitement, Dave realizes he may be the only person in this room who _hasn’t_ traveled through time.

“It’s a time machine, okay? He works for my former employer, an organization in charge of monitoring and maintaining the timeline.”

“Maintaining the timeline,” Diego repeats, looking appraisingly at Colin.

“We need to find out why they sent him here to grab Klaus, and that’s not going to come from inside that briefcase.”

“He did say something about being here for someone else.” Klaus tilts his head towards the back wall, and for the first time, Dave notices the dark stain on the floor. A sizable bloodstain, just behind the chair he’d been stuck in. His knees go watery and he leans back on the countertop for support.

He only realizes his ears were ringing once Klaus’ voice filters back in, part way through an explanation. “...a signed statement and then took him out.” Dave has no clue how Klaus came to get this information on Colin’s previous victim, but no one is questioning the accuracy of his claims.

“So they didn’t know exactly why Dave’s life plot was changing,” Five muses. He paces back and forth with building excitement. “They wanted Colin to figure it out. They might not know that we’re here yet; we might still have a chance.”

“That’s a time machine,” Diego says, still staring at the briefcase. “That thing lets you change time.”

Five’s not listening to anyone but himself, thinking out loud. “But they are going to notice if he doesn’t fix things. They’re watching closely now for any abnormalities. Maybe it’s better to send Dave back to his normal life after all.”

Dave feels like he should have some say in this. He isn’t a package to be sent here and there at this kid’s discretion. Especially given how this conversation started with his insistence that if Dave didn’t stay put, he would die.

“Maybe no one will notice, if he gets back quickly enough. Or maybe they’ll be looking at the wrong thing…” With each theory, he sounds less confident.

“You’re worried about ‘quickly enough?’” Diego says incredulously. “This is a _time machine.”_

In one smooth motion, he spins the briefcase and pops open the clasps. Then there’s a flash of light, a rush of air, a sound Dave has never heard before. And when the spots fade from his vision, Diego and the briefcase have disappeared. Of course. Every single one of Klaus’ brothers can do that, apparently. Dave should have known.

He’s not a lost cause, though; he’s at least unsurprised by Five’s reaction.

“Son of a bitch.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> heyyy sorry about this being a literal actual month 😬😬 It did turn out to be a long one, if that helps at all! I was so sure that last scene was going to be two scenes in two different povs in two different chapters, but then not so much.
> 
> I would love to say next time will be faster, but I don't know that I can hold to that. I've also got a special September project coming so that doesn't help with this update schedule. Thanks very much for reading anyway, all of you who do!!
> 
> Chapter 9 Sneak Peek: (a really small one otherwise this chapter wouldn't be going up today)  
> There’s a reason why strong emotions are so unfamiliar to Vanya, and it’s sitting in this very room, a tied up mascot of her ruined life.


End file.
